Wilbur Richard Knorr (1945–1997): An Appreciation

✍ Scribed by David Fowler

• Book ID: 102568644
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 138 KB
• Volume: 25
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0315-0860
• DOI: 10.1006/hmat.1998.2199

✦ Synopsis

In addition, he published 64 articles (of which 11 were sets of entries for encyclopaedias, dictionaries, etc.), many of these long and technical, five substantial essay reviews and other shorter reviews, and, at the time of his death, he had a further 18 articles in progress.

He was born on August 29, 1945, in New York and educated at Harvard University, where he received his B.A. (summa cum laude) in 1966, his A.M. in 1968, and his Ph.D. in 1973 (his thesis advisors were John Murdoch and G. E. L. Owen), so all of his subsequent work was achieved in a mere 24 years. He had a natural ability with languages and taught himself Greek, then Arabic, and then Hebrew (which he also used to discuss some aspects of the Hebrew translations of mathematics). Another of his interests and abilities was playing the violin and making music: he was in the New York State Competitions Youth Orchestra while in high school, the Harvard Orchestra of which he was first violin and manager, and informal chamber groups, but gave up playing when he went to Stanford. (When his friend Edith Mendez asked why, he replied that it would have taken 10 hours a week and he felt that he wouldn't have the time.) During his seven years as a Ph.D. student, he was a teaching fellow at Harvard, then an assistant professor at Berkeley; thereafter he was a postdoctoral fellow for a year at Cambridge UK, four years at Brooklyn College, and a year at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, before he took up a position at Stanford where he stayed for the rest of his too short life. He was on the editorial boards of the Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Isis, and Historia Mathematica, and a referee for several journals, very actively so as authors can testify, this being yet another illustration of his passionate concern for thoroughness in his subject and the tenacity with which he held to a point of view.

The development of his interests can be seen in the emphasis of his books. The first phase was his interest in the establishment of mathematics from before Euclid to Archimedes and Apollonius-the foundations, nature, and methods of early Greek mathematics-and is roughly bracketed by the books, The Evolution of the Euclidean Elements and The Ancient Tradition of Geometric Problems. The second phase, dealing with the ancient editions of texts, their reception by Arabic mathematicians, and their further transmission up to the medieval period, was introduced