The Concept of Number and Magnitude in Ancient Greek Mathematics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22370/rhv2017iss9pp7-23Keywords:
number, magnitude, incommensurable, ancient Greek mathematicsAbstract
The aim of this text is to present the evolution of the relation between the concept of number and magnitude in ancient Greek mathematics. We will briefly revise the Pythagorean program and its crisis with the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes. Next, we move to the work of Eudoxus and present its advances. He improved the Pythagorean theory of proportions, so that it could also treat incommensurable magnitudes. We will see that, as the time passed by, the existence of incommensurable magnitudes was no longer something strange. Already in the period of Plato and Aristotle, their existence was common place: up to the point of being considered absurd that all magnitudes were commensurable. Aristotle criticized the Pythagorean program and defended that, though belonging to the same category (quantity), number and magnitude are of distinct species: number is discrete and magnitude is continuous. We finish by presenting briefly how the concept of number was amplified throughout the centuries until it came also to include the notion of continuity.
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