MEMORIAL RESOLUTION                                                 SenD#4772
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                           Wilbur Richard Knorr
                                (1945-1997)

Wilbur Richard Knorr died on March 18th 1997, of cancer (melanoma), at the 
Palo Alto Nursing Center, after an illness of half a year.  He was 51, and had 
been a member of the Stanford faculty for almost two decades.  He was survived 
by his mother, Mrs. Dorothy Knorr of Queensbury, NY; by his sister Valerie 
Maione, her husband Michael Maione and their children Elizabeth and Alexander, 
of Columbia, MD.  A memorial service was held in Stanford's Memorial Church on 
March 31.

Knorr was born August 29th, 1945 in Richmond Hill, New York.  He graduated 
from Harvard in 1966, summa cum laude (and Phi Beta Kappa), and continued at 
Harvard for graduate degrees, attaining the Ph.D. in 1973.  He was a teaching 
fellow and teaching assistant at Harvard between 1968 and 1971, and was a 
junior faculty member a the University of California in Berkeley and at 
Brooklyn College between 1971 and 1979 (until Brooklyn discontinued its 
History of Science Department), and was a member of the Institute for Advanced 
Study at Princeton in 1978-79.  Starting in the study of the history of 
computer science, he soon settled into work on the history of ancient Greek 
mathematics and its medieval continuations.

Knorr came to Stanford in 1979, and was advanced to permanency as Associate 
Professor in 1983.  He was Professor, of history of science, beginning in 
1990, with joint appointments in The Department of Philosophy and the 
Department of Classics, and in the History of Science Program.  His courses 
included surveys of the history of cosmology from ancient times to the 
twentieth century.  One graduate student has described him as "wonderful, 
patient and extremely quick.  I would get piles of notes from him whenever I 
handed something in." A continuing education course once organized by Knorr 
for the wider public involved two other professors (a physicist and a Chinese 
specialist); it surveyed ancient astronomical knowledge from China to the Near 
East to Mesoamerica.  (Knorr's rich personal library contained the latest work 
on pre-Columbian astronomy.) His ability to engage an intelligent public 
audience is evidenced by a highly readable article on comets, notably 
Halley's, in the Stanford Magazine, Summer 1985.

But Knorr made his mark in work of great difficulty and subtlety.  One 
colleague has described him as "one of the world's most distinguished 
historians of ancient mathematics." In his too short life of effective work, 
scarcely twenty-four years, he produced four books, over fifty-five major 
articles (many of them long and technical), and left seventeen more partly 
finished.  He wrote many reviews, including five major review articles.  He 
was on the editorial boards of the Archive for History of the Exact Sciences, 
Isis, and Historia Mathematica.  If a scholar whose interests were 
extraordinarily broad can be allowed a special interest, Knorr's was the 
history and analysis of the development of geometry and proportion theory in 
the Greek world between 400 and 200 BCE.  His distinctive claim was to reject 
the received view, that mathematicians picked up their cues from the puzzlings 
of the Eleatics and other philosophers.  Knorr argued that ancient mathematics 
was autonomous, making stunning advances quite without powerful modern 
techniques, and that the philosophers looked on with amazement, picking up 
crumbs.  He pursued the study of such texts as survive -- Euclid, Archimedes, 
Apollonius, etc. -- through late antiquity and the middle ages, teaching 
himself Arabic and Hebrew for the purpose.  (He had Greek and Latin of course; 
one of his hobbies was Biblical studies, pursued in Hebrew.) Thus he became 
expert in high philological (and highly controversial) problems of the 
filiation of medieval manuscripts.  He later became an expert on manuscript 
illumination and handwriting, in his studies of the astronomical tradition in 
Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a subject which consumed 
him in the last years of his life and which constitutes most of his unfinished 
work.

One of his Ph.D. students, now a professor of the history of science in 
another California university, has offered evaluations of Knorr's books: "In 
his book The Evolution of the Euclidean Elements (1975), Knorr provided a 
coherent, autonomous, mathematical reconstruction of the development of 
proportion theory built out of technical concerns in early Greek number theory 
and so-called geometrical algebra, preserved in texts such as Euclid, 
Archimedes, the scholia to Theodosius, Nicomachus, Theon of Smyrna, and 
Boethius.  In his most recent work, he was drawing connections between some 
Babylonian algebraic texts and Euclid's Elements II Š to develop a deeper 
understanding of the discovery of incommensurability.  Knorr used close 
textual analysis of all aspects of the text, including the structure of 
proofs, the layout of diagrams in proofs, or the use of words Š to work out 
the history of mathematical influence and dependence. Š His work The Ancient 
Tradition of Geometrical Problems (1986) is probably the best general history 
of Greek mathematics, even though it deals with only one aspect of the 
subject.  In it he traces the history of the three major problems, circle 
squaring, angle trisection, and cube duplication."

Using these subtle techniques in many of his writings, he was able to retrieve 
from later Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew sources evidence of classical 
mathematics and mechanics.  He followed this study with a magisterial 
treatment of the textual tradition of Greek mathematics and the practice of 
ancient and medieval editors and mathematicians using Greek mathematics, 
particularly of Archimedes' Dimension of the Circle.  Knorr showed how this 
text emerges as a palimpsest of repeated editing, and made bold and convincing 
conjectures in many cases as to who the editors were and how they worked.  
Certainly the most striking was his hesitant suggestion that Hypatia was both 
a source of an important extant commentary on Apollonius' conics, and the 
editor of the common ancestor of the extant Greek edition of the Dimension of 
the Circle and of its medieval Latin translations.

The same writer concludes, "Š he was a wonderful person, passionate about 
everything he did, rose gardening, weight lifting, Biblical study Š frugal in 
his personal life (except when it came to book acquisition)Š Another colleague 
and close friend in England recalls his love of music, gymnastic "working 
out," and his "infuriating puns"; he recalls Wilbur's participation in a 
conference only a few months away from death but still vigorous, jogging 
daily.  Unmarried, he was a beloved "Uncle Billy" to his young niece and 
nephew.

Stanford's faculty has lost a colleague of a kind that can never be replaced.
(This committee acknowledges gratefully the collaboration of Henry R. Mendell, 
Professor of the History of Science, California State University in Los 
Angeles.)


                                              Committee:

                                                David S. Nivison
                                                Patrick Suppes
                                                John Perry