Anthemius Tralles
Anthemius Tralles, born about 474 in Tralles the Meander and died about 534 , was a famous mathematician and architect Byzantine.
As an architect, he became famous by the construction of the basilica Hagia Sophia in Constantinople , with Isidore of Miletus , between 532 and 537.
As a mathematician, he made some remarkable work on the bevel , which he was also very useful for the construction of Hagia Sophia. Among these include a method of constructing a ellipse using a string attached to two foci (called method gardener) or the study of focal properties of a parabola , which enabled him to design parabolic mirrors to concentrate the rays of the sun : the "burning mirrors".
It was at Anthemius that we owe the story of the burning mirrors that Archimedes would have built to burn the sails of the Roman galleys came to besiege Syracuse. Transmitted to the Renaissance by the writings of Alhazen and Vitellion , this story will be repeated, sometimes as an object of research ( Oronce Fine ), sometimes as an object of contempt ( Descartes ) by scholars of the Renaissance in the seventeenth century.
A fragment of his treatise on burning mirrors was published in 1777 by Louis Dupuy as the ("wonderful machine"), and was again republished in 1786 in the History of the Academy of instruments (vol. 42).
Bibliography
Primary Sources
- Procopius , Justinian's Augusti dificiis orationes Caesars, Book I, Chapter 1
- Agathias , Histories, Book V
Secondary Sources
- Fragment of a book on Greek Anthemius mechanical paradoxes, with a tr. fr. & Notes by M. Dupuy, 1777, 40 p. Available on Google Books
- Edward Gibbon , History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Vol. I
- R. Rashed, Les catoptriciens Greek: the burning mirrors, ed. Les Belles Lettres, coll. "Bude", 2002. ( ISBN 2-251-00481-5 )
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