INTRODUCTION AND PLAN OF THE CHAPTER

The term ‘formula’ is inevitable. Yet it is also very problematic. ‘Greek mathematics’ is at an intersection of two fields, in both of which the term has (completely independently) already been put to use. The general mathematical use is easy to deal with. Suffice to say that my ‘formulae’ are not equations. They are a (relatively) rigid way of using groups of words. And here is the second problem. ‘Formulae’ as groups of words are the mainstay of twentieth-century Homeric scholarship (and, derivatively, of much other folklorist and literary scholarship). Thus, they evoke a specific – if not always a precise! – connotation. This connotation is not wholly relevant to my purposes. However, it is not entirely misleading, either. While my use of ‘formulae’ is not the same as that of Homeric scholarship, it is related to it in some ways.

This chapter, therefore, will start from the Homeric case. In section 1, both the problematics and the definition of ‘formulae’ will be approached through the Homeric case. Section 2 offers a typology of Greek mathematical formulae. Besides giving the main groups, I also describe some key parameters along which different formulae may be compared. Section 3 then analyses the behaviour of formulae. In section 4 I return to the Homeric case, and summarise the possibilities concerning the emergence and the function of Greek mathematical formulae.