Does anyone know anything about Hipparchus (Ancient Mathmetician)??

Question

We are doing a thing @ school and i hve to research Hipparchus!!!!

Answer 1

Hipparchus (190-127 BC) was the pre-eminent astronomer of the ancient world. Among his achievements was the discovery of the precession of the equinox, based on the recorded observations from earlier times. In addition to his astronomical work, he was also a mathematician who considered a variety of purely mathematical problems. According to Heath's "History of Greek Mathematics"







In pure mathematics [Hipparchus] is said to have considered a problem in permutations and combinations, the problem of finding the number of different possible combinations of 10 axioms or assumptions, which he made to be 103,049 (v.l. 101,049) or 310,952 according as the axioms were affirmed or denied. It seems impossible to make anything of these figures.







That last sentence expresses the frustration of scholars who have tried to understand exactly what Hipparchus was enumerating. (The parenthetical number in Heath’s comment will be explained below.) The only known source of information on these statements come from the Roman biographer Plutarch (50-120 AD), who referred to these enumerations twice in his writings. In an essay on the interesting subject of "whether there can be new diseases, and how [they are] caused", Plutarch discusses what would today be regarded as the combinatorial aspects of genetic mutations, and the likelihood of such mutations resulting in new diseases. In the course of this remarkably modern sounding discussion, he remarks that







Chrysippus says that the number of compound propositions that can be made from only ten simple propositions exceeds a million. (Hipparchus, to be sure, refuted this by showing that on the affirmative side there are 101,049 compound statements, and on the negative side 310,952.)