Roy Wagner


Last Name

Wagner

First Name

Roy

ORCID

0000-0002-7775-0542

Organisational unit

09591 - Wagner, Roy / Wagner, Roy

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Publications 1 - 10 of 60
  • Book review of Leo Corry's "A Brief History of Numbers"
    Item type: Book Review
    Wagner, Roy (2017)
    היסטוריה
  • Between music and geometry: a proposal for the early intended application of Euclid’s Elements Book X
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wagner, Roy; Netz, Reviel (2023)
    British Journal for the History of Mathematics
    This paper attempts a new interpretation of Euclid’s Elements Book X. This study of irrational lines has long been viewed as an anomaly within the Euclidean corpus: it includes a tedious and seemingly pointless classification of lines, known as ‘the cross of mathematicians’. Following Ken Saito’s toolbox conception, we do not try to reconstruct the book’s mathematical process of discovery, but, instead, the kind of applications for which it serves as a toolbox. Our claim is that the book provides tools for solving questions about proportional lines inspired by results in music theory and a context of Pythagorean-Platonic interest in proportions. We show that the entire content of Book X can indeed be accounted for as a set of tools for these questions, augmented by the general editorial norms that govern the Elements. We conclude by explaining why the purpose of Book X as reconstructed here has disappeared from mathematical memory.
  • Content and Context of Kaṇakkatikāram Manuscripts: Pre-Modern Malayalam Elementary Mathematics
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wagner, Roy; Ashokan, Arun (2024)
    History of Science in South Asia
    Kaṇakkatikāram is the title of elementary mathematical treatises that focus on measurements, calculation techniques and practical-recreational word problems. These treatises enjoyed substantial distribution in medieval and colonial Tamil Nadu and Kerala (Parameswara Iyer 1990, Vol. 2, 524-527). In this paper we will describe these treatises based on Malayalam manuscripts. We will discuss their content, linguistic and stylistic form, context of use, relation to actual professional practices, the cultural values that they express, and the political-economic reality that they reflect. Since the Tamil versions have already been analyzed in Senthil Babu (2022), here we focus on aspects that complement his analysis and on features that are unique to, or more salient in, the Malayalam versions.
  • The Occupation-Image: A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wagner, Roy; Hagin, Boaz (2014)
    Journal of Film and Video
    This article analyzes video documentaries made by the Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, which document Israeli violations of Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories. It borrows elements from Deleuze’s two cinema books in order to come up with an interpretation of B’Tselem’s videos and elicit a political claim.
  • Mathematics in Hebrew in Medieval Europe
    Item type: Book Chapter
    Wagner, Roy (2016)
    Sourcebook in the Mathematics of Medieval Europe and North Africa
  • מעשה סדום פוליטי
    Item type: Monograph
    Alsheh, Yehonatan; Wagner, Roy (2007)
    A discussion of Jean Genet's life and views, and its relevance for contemporary politics.
  • Tail estimates for sums of variables sampled by a random walk
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wagner, Roy (2008)
    Combinatorics, Probability & Computing
    We prove tail estimates for variables of the form P i f(Xi), where (Xi)I is a sequence of states drawn from a reversible Markov chain, or, equivalently, from a random walk on an undirected graph. The estimates are in terms of the range of the function f, its variance, and the spectrum of the graph. The purpose of our estimates is to determine the number of chain/walk samples which are required for approximating the expectation of a distribution on vertices of a graph, especially an expander. The estimates must therefore provide information for fixed number of samples (as in Gillman’s [4]) rather than just asymptotic information. Our proofs are more elementary than other proofs in the literature, and our results are sharper. We obtain Bernstein and Bennett-type inequalities, as well as an inequality for subgaussian variables.
  • Notes on an inequality by Pisier for functions on the discrete cube
    Item type: Book Chapter
    Wagner, Roy (2000)
    Lecture Notes in Mathematics ~ Geometric Aspects of Functional Analysis
  • The Kriyākramakarī’s Integrative Approach to Mathematical Knowledge
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wagner, Roy (2018)
    History of Science in South Asia
    The purpose of this paper is to review the general organization of knowledge in the Kriyākramakarī, a sixteenth-century treatise of Kerala mathematics. Specifically, I will argue that the authors' interest in justification or proof is integrative, rather than hierarchical or cumulative. In other words, the purpose of proofs in the Kriyākramakarī is to connect various different aspects of mathematics, rather than just establish results by means of previously known results.
Publications 1 - 10 of 60