Talk:Apollonius of Perga
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A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
[edit]The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 04:12, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
The times of Apollonius
[edit]To say that "Apollonius lived toward the end of the hellenistic period" seems to me misleading. The hellenistic period goes from the rise of Alexander to the death of Cleopatra. Therefore Apollonius was right in the middle. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.28.55.45 (talk) 03:52, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
St. John's
[edit]Do we really want so much about St. John's College in an article on Apollonius? E.g., do we need to know that they lost their accreditation in 1936? I'm talking about this passage:
- Heath's work is indispensable. He taught throughout the early 20th century, passing away in 1940, but meanwhile another point of view was developing. St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe), which had been a military school since colonial times, preceding the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, to which it is adjacent, in 1936 lost its accreditation and was on the brink of bankruptcy. In desperation the board summoned Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan from the University of Chicago, where they had been developing a new theoretical program for instruction of the Classics. Leaping at the opportunity, in 1937 they instituted the “new program” at St. John's, later dubbed the Great Books program, a fixed curriculum that would teach the works of select key contributors to the culture of western civilization. At St. John's, Apollonius came to be taught as himself, not as some adjunct to analytic geometry. — Preceding unsigned comment added by John Baez (talk • contribs) 20:35, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
[edit] This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2021 and 25 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Escalara2019. Peer reviewers: Proc1996.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 14:32, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps Conics should be split into a new article?
[edit]As one of the most historically important mathematics books, it seems to me like Conics deserves its own article, just as we have separate articles for Euclid and Elements. It's good to have a solid summary here, but at some level of detail it starts to distract from the subject of Apollonius himself, so having that topic hosted as a section here makes it harder to add material about individual important theorems within, its historical influence, etc. that starts to seem out of scope for an article about the person of Apollonius. –jacobolus (t) 04:59, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
- This strikes me as a good idea, as well.
- I'm a relative newcomer to Wikipedia, so if I were to try it, how would you recommend that I learn how to do that properly? RowanElder (talk) 18:08, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
- See WP:PROPERSPLIT. I think this split is uncontroversial enough that someone could just go for it, without making a formal proposal.
- Both of the page titles Apollonius' Conics and Conics already exist as redirects to the appropriate section of this article, so the thing to do would be to pick one of them (I'd probably go for the former name, which is more explicit), cut/paste the material about Conics from this article into there, including any relevant material from § Sources, § Further Reading, and § External links (some may be relevant to both articles). Use an edit summary such as:
Contents [[WP:SPLIT]] from [[Apollonius of Perga]]; please see its history for attribution.
- Next, write a slimmed down summary and leave it behind at this article under § Conics, using the {{main}} template at the top linking to the new article. I'd make the summary here longer than usual for such a section, since Conics is so important to the topic of Apollonius. For this one, use an edit summary along the lines of:
Conics section [[WP:SPLIT]] to [[Apollonius' Conics]], leaving a summary.
- All of the redirects Conics, On Conic Sections, and Conics (Apollonius) should then be changed to point at the new article. –jacobolus (t) 18:49, 15 September 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you, this is clear. I'll give it a shot before long. RowanElder (talk) 02:08, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
- I hadn't forgotten this, but other work, particularly at Rate of convergence and Series (mathematics) took precedence over this for me in the short term. Then more recently I decided to stop working on mathematics pages on Wikipedia, so I no longer plan to do this. RowanElder (talk) 19:52, 27 October 2024 (UTC)
That's fine. Wikipedia is a volunteer service. You are not compelled to do any particular work here, and you can take a break or walk away at any time. We have no deadline and no one is depending on changes. If anyone else wants to try this split, it's still a good idea. Or I might sometime feel motivated to tackle it (but not today).–jacobolus (t) 23:18, 27 October 2024 (UTC)- I did not think I was compelled and I didn't write that because I felt I might be. It's just a notice of changed intent.
- I have little idea what implicit psychological model could make it look as if I felt I was feeling compelled. It feels creepy to be misread that way though I don't doubt you mean well. RowanElder (talk) 00:14, 28 October 2024 (UTC)
- All the best. –jacobolus (t) 02:28, 28 October 2024 (UTC)
- Though you deleted your original reply -- something that I guess I should get used to -- I am still going to reply.
- I didn't think I needed to explain, just that it would be polite. I didn't apologize.
- I didn't mean more by "implicit psychological model" than "model of mind by which one infers intent from writing." You inferred intent from my writing, so in that sense you had an implicit psychological model. RowanElder (talk) 02:30, 28 October 2024 (UTC)
- I hadn't forgotten this, but other work, particularly at Rate of convergence and Series (mathematics) took precedence over this for me in the short term. Then more recently I decided to stop working on mathematics pages on Wikipedia, so I no longer plan to do this. RowanElder (talk) 19:52, 27 October 2024 (UTC)
- Thank you, this is clear. I'll give it a shot before long. RowanElder (talk) 02:08, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
- I agree with this as well, I think much of what we have now ought to be cleaned up first but we will probably want a standalone article for Conics at some point; While it's Apollonius's only major extant work, there's a lot of information in Pappus of Alexandria on Apollonius's lost works that have inspired reconstructions of them, which we could discuss more on detail here, including the story with the development of Descartes' theorem. Psychastes (talk) 16:10, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
Astrolabe
[edit]The Astrolabe article mentions Apollonius as the inventor of the instrument. But no mention of it here. Could maybe someone add it? Thanks. 2600:1700:1C64:8240:3D5F:3F0D:1558:A2A8 (talk) 07:42, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
- There's an ongoing discussion about the early history of astrolabes at talk:astrolabe. See also Stereographic projection § History. The only evidence that Apollonius had anything to do with them is circumstantial: the theorem that the stereographic projection maps circles on the plane to circles on the sphere relies on a related theorem which can be found in Conics. Any attribution of the stereographic projection or planar astrolabe to Apollonius is highly speculative. –jacobolus (t) 13:07, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
Double cone
[edit]Double cone is referred to but not defined 24.192.101.186 (talk) 13:04, 25 April 2024 (UTC)
- If you click the immediately preceding wiki-link cone you can see some discussion (albeit not great) about double cones. –jacobolus (t) 14:57, 25 April 2024 (UTC)
Cleanup tag
[edit]I hope the Cleanup Rewrite tag i've added is self-explanatory. There is an EB1911 article cited, which I believe this article was originally copied from, and I think a case could be made that it would be better to start over from there. Psychastes (talk) 05:38, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- actually, it looks like the problems may have been primarily introduced in 2017. i've reverted the article to the last clean version. most of that content was not cited, and much of it was either off-topic or highly opinionated, so I doubt it's worth trawling through, but if anyone wants to re-add (properly cited!) material on a case-by-case basis from the post-2017 version there might be something of use there. But it would probably be more cost-positive to just consult Fried and Unguru. Psychastes (talk) 05:52, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- This kind of heavy-handed revert throws away lots of work by (often anonymous/logged-out) Wikipedians, and should be avoided wherever possible, including here. You should not just slash and burn like this unless you are actually intending to replace the removed material article with something better. In which case, you might as well do your rewrite up front. Even if the material removed was largely a paraphrase of Apollonius's own testimony without sufficient discussion from secondary sources and written in a somewhat flowery style, it was still better than nothing (and better than the version from before a previous cleanup pass I put it through). Do you have a concrete plan? If not, I'll revert back. –jacobolus (t) 06:43, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- My concern is less about the paraphrase of Apollonius's own testimony (not ideal, but surely better than nothing) and more with the large amounts of WP:POV and WP:OR, for example:
The authors cite Euclid, Elements, Book III, which concerns itself with circles, and maximum and minimum distances from interior points to the circumference. Without admitting to any specific generality they use terms such as “like” or “the analog of.” They are known for innovating the term “neusis-like.” A neusis construction was a method of fitting a given segment between two given curves. Given a point P, and a ruler with the segment marked off on it. one rotates the ruler around P cutting the two curves until the segment is fitted between them. In Book V, P is the point on the axis. Rotating a ruler around it, one discovers the distances to the section, from which the minimum and maximum can be discerned. The technique is not applied to the situation, so it is not neusis. The authors use neusis-like, seeing an archetypal similarity to the ancient method.
- where "the authors" and "they" in this case refers not to Apollonius but with the secondary source that our article has decided to argue with. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what this is saying, the flowery style certainly doesn't help either! I do think the advantage of a slash and burn approach is that it encourages more new contributions from other editors that may ultimately result in a better article, however, I don't have a concrete plan to do so right now, and it was indisputably a very WP:BOLD edit on my part, so I'll revert my removal.
- I'm going to revert to the version with the cleanup rewrite tag; I think much of this article could be fixed by someone without access to the sources, as much of it is simply a case of WP:NOT, and it couldn't hurt to have more eyes on it. Psychastes (talk) 16:01, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- I mainly don't think we should trample good faith contributions like the current text here, mostly written by User:Botteville, even if they are in idiosyncratic style and somewhat outside Wikipedia guidelines, unless we have something better.
- I don't think cutting back to a more stub-like state significantly changes the likelihood of new contributions, unfortunately. Or at least, that's not my personal impression in similar cases. (Hard to judge for sure, since the rate of significant contributions on this type of article is stochastic with time scale on the order of decades.)
- Anyway, if anyone wants to clean up the current text here, replacing material section by section with something better sourced and according more closely with modern academic consensus, I'd be in favor. User:Botteville, if you could list some of your other sources it would be helpful. –jacobolus (t) 16:24, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
- This kind of heavy-handed revert throws away lots of work by (often anonymous/logged-out) Wikipedians, and should be avoided wherever possible, including here. You should not just slash and burn like this unless you are actually intending to replace the removed material article with something better. In which case, you might as well do your rewrite up front. Even if the material removed was largely a paraphrase of Apollonius's own testimony without sufficient discussion from secondary sources and written in a somewhat flowery style, it was still better than nothing (and better than the version from before a previous cleanup pass I put it through). Do you have a concrete plan? If not, I'll revert back. –jacobolus (t) 06:43, 1 May 2025 (UTC)
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