Pandrosion of Alexandria () was a mathematician in fourth-century-AD Alexandria, discussed in the Mathematical Collection of Pappus of Alexandria and known for having possibly developed an approximate method for doubling the cube. She is likely the earliest known female mathematician.
Pandrosion of Alexandria () was a mathematician in fourth-century-AD Alexandria, discussed in the Mathematical Collection of Pappus of Alexandria and known for having possibly developed an approximate method for doubling the cube. She is likely the earliest known female mathematician.
==Contributions== thumb|Doubling the cube is calculating a cube with double the volume of the another.|alt=Figure representing two cubes: a green cube with an edge marked "1" and containing "V1 = 1³", an arrow pointing left, a larger blue cube with and edge marked "cubic root of 2" and cointaining "V2 = 2 ⋅ 1³". Pappus dedicated a section of his Collection to correcting what he perceives as errors in Pandrosion's students. Although Pappus does not directly state that the method is Pandrosion's, he includes in this section a method for calculating numerically accurate but approximate solutions to the problem of doubling the cube, or more generally of calculating cube roots. It is a "recursive geometric" solution, but three-dimensional rather than working within the plane. Pappus criticized this work as lacking a proper mathematical proof. Another method included in the same section, and potentially attributable in the same way indirectly to Pandrosion, is a correct and exact method for constructing the geometric mean, simpler than the method used by Pappus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).