Wilbur Knorr


Wilbur Richard Knorr was an American historian of mathematics and a professor in the departments of philosophy and classics at Stanford University. He has been called "one of the most profound and certainly the most provocative historian of Greek mathematics" of the 20th century.

Biography

Knorr was born August 29, 1945, in Richmond Hill, Queens. He did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University from 1963 to 1966 and stayed there for his Ph.D., which he received in 1973 under the supervision of John Emery Murdoch and G. E. L. Owen. After postdoctoral studies at Cambridge University, he taught at Brooklyn College, but lost his position when the college's Downtown Brooklyn campus was closed as part of New York's mid-1970s fiscal crisis. After taking a temporary position at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor in 1979, was tenured there in 1983, and was promoted to full professor in 1990.
He died March 18, 1997 in Palo Alto, California, of melanoma.
Knorr was a talented violinist, and played first violin in the Harvard Orchestra, but he gave up his music when he came to Stanford, as the pressures of the tenure process did not allow him adequate practice time.

Books

;The Evolution of the Euclidean Elements: A Study of the Theory of Incommensurable Magnitudes and Its Significance for Early Greek Geometry.
;Ancient Sources of the Medieval Tradition of Mechanics: Greek, Arabic, and Latin studies of the balance.
;The Ancient Tradition of Geometric Problems.
;Textual Studies in Ancient and Medieval Geometry.