SCIENTISTS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

These report-oriented lives of ten eminent early scientists combine what scanty biographical details have survived the centuries with clear statements of each subject’s contributions. Bowing to tradition, the arrangement is chronological, beginning with Pythagoras in the sixth century b.c., ending with al-Khwarizmi, who brought the zero into western mathematics in the ninth century a.d., and including among the usual suspects both the librarian Eratosthenes and Hypatia, a renowned Alexandrian scholar. The authors draw their information from a few secondary sources, to judge from the endnotes; still, as a supplement to encyclopedias or such Eurocentric collective biographies as Philip Cave’s Giants of Science (1959), this will find a place in library collections. (b&w reproductions, index, not seen, notes) (Biography. 10-13)