Six Easy Lectures on Ancient Mathematical Astronomy

Dennis Duke. "Six Easy Lectures on Ancient Mathematical Astronomy"
Florida State University, AvE MMR | 2009-02 | ISBN: n/a | 218 pages | PDF | 12 Mb

The course provides a critical look at the evidence used to reconstruct ancient astronomy, includes excerpts from ancient texts, and discusses the role of astronomy in the various cultures. Accessible to a wide audience, this course will appeal to anyone interested in how our understanding of our place in the universe has changed and developed, from ancient times through the Renaissance.

Almagest Books 1-13, the celestial sphere, the Sun & the Moon, stars and catalogs, risings and settings, parallax, precession, the length of the year & the months, calendars, the geometric models, geocentric vs heliocentric, the planets, the anomalies, the equant, the developments (India, Islam, Copernicus, Kepler) and more...
The ancient astronomical tradition is one of impressive duration and richness from planet observations by the Babylonians in the second millennium BC to the astronomical revolution of the sixteenth century. Two questions constantly recur: what evidence permits us to reconstruct the astronomy of the ancient past? How was astronomy actually practiced? Tracing ideas from ancient Babylon to sixteenth-century Europe, the course places its greatest emphasis on the Greek period, when astronomers developed the geometric and philosophical ideas that have determined the subsequent character of Western astronomy. The course approaches this history through the concrete details of ancient astronomical practice.

TOC
Lecture 1
• Where, When and Who
• Almagest Books 1 and 2
• the celestial sphere
• numbers and angles (sexagesimal base-60)
• obliquity and latitude and the related instruments
• plane geometry and trigonometry, the chord tables
• spherical trigonometry, circles on the celestial sphere

Lecture 2
• Almagest Book 3
• the length of the year
• the length of the seasons
• the geometric models
• the length of the day
• the background
• lost episodes in solar history

Lecture 3
• Almagest Books 4 – 6
• the Moon
• the problem of parallax
• the length of the various months
• the first geometric model
• the second geometric model
• sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon
• the background

Lecture 4
• Almagest Books 7–8
• the stars
• precession
• the constellations
• rising and setting and the calendar
• the background

Lectures 5-6
• Almagest Books 9–13
• geocentric vs. heliocentric point of view
• the wandering stars, or planets
• the two anomalies
• the eccentric plus epicycle and its problems
• the equant
• latitude
• distances
• the background



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http://rapidshare.com/files/199226512/AncAstroLectgPG.rar
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