David Pingree

David Edwin Pingree (January 2, 1933, New Haven, Connecticut – November 11, 2005, Providence, Rhode Island) was a University Professor, and Professor of History of Mathematics and Classics at Brown University, and one of America's leading historians of the Exact Sciences (primarily Mathematics) in antiquity.

He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1950 and thereafter attended Harvard University, where he earned his doctorate in 1960 with a dissertation on the supposed transmission of Hellenistic astrology to India under the joint supervision of Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr. and Otto Eduard Neugebauer.

He joined the History of Mathematics Department at Brown University in 1971, eventually holding the chair until his death.

As successor to Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) in Brown’s History of Mathematics Department (which Neugebauer established in 1947), Pingree numbered among his colleagues men of extraordinary learning, especially Abraham Sachs and Gerald Toomer.

Jon McGinnis of the University of Missouri, St. Louis, describes Pingree’s life-work thus:

...Pingree devoted himself to the study of the exact sciences, such as mathematics, mathematical astronomy and astral omens. He was also acutely interested in the transmission of those sciences across cultural and linguistic boundaries. His interest in the transmission of the exact sciences came from two fronts or, perhaps more correctly, his interest represents two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, he was concerned with how one culture might appropriate, and so alter, the science of another (earlier) culture in order to make that earlier scientific knowledge more accessible to the recipient culture. On the other hand, Pingree was also interested in how scientific texts surviving from a later culture might be used to reconstruct or cast light on our fragmentary records of earlier sciences. In this quest, Pingree would, with equal facility use ancient Greek works to clarify Babylonian texts on divination, turn to Arabic treatises to illuminate early Greek astronomical and astrological texts, seek Sanskrit texts to explain Arabic astronomy, or track the appearance of Indian astronomy in medieval Europe.

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