Personae at play. 'Men of Mathematics' in commentary

Mathematical writers, above all, Euclid, tend to present their theorems as decontextualized, abstract propositions, which has become the standard modus of textual presentation in theoretical mathematics. Mathematical commentators, however, provide their readers with personal names and historical facts in order to elucidate problems, provide contexts of discovery, or construct doxographies, among other things. Modern readers have used such information for the construction of histories of science. When we look at these passages, however, we see that personal names and information about mathematicians of the past can serve quite a range of different objectives, such as the strategic self-positioning of the commentator vis-a-vis the past or present of mathematics, the education of the reader, mathematical or moral, the construction of the history of the field, etc. Not only does the commentator present a persona of himself to the reader, he can also turn colleagues and predecessors into personae. This paper attempts to elucidate the practice, by offering four examples of such plays of and with personae, in Pappus, Eutocius, al-Nayrizi, and Proclus. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.