Facts: - residence: united kingdom - known for: greek mathematics - death date: 13 april 2004 - workplaces: manchester university university of warwick - birth date: 28 april 1937 - name: david fowler - occupation: mathematician - death place: warwick , england - birth place: blackburn , england - alma mater: gonville and caius college , cambridge Based on these bullet points, write a short biography describing the life of david fowler -lrb- mathematician -rrb- .
david herbert fowler -lrb- ; april 28 , 1937 -- april 13 , 2004 -rrb- was a historian of greek mathematics who published work on pre-eudoxian ratio theory -lrb- using the process he called anthyphairesis -rrb- .he disputed the standard story of greek mathematical discovery , in which the discovery of the phenomenon of incommensurability came as a shock .his thesis was that , not having the real numbers , nor division , the greeks faced difficulties in defining rigorously the notion of ratio .they called ratio ' logos ' .euclid book v is an exposition of eudoxus 's theory of proportion , which eudoxus discovered about 350bc , and which has been described as the jewel in the crown of greek mathematics .eudoxus showed by a form of abstract algebra how to handle rigorously the case when two ratios are equal , without actually having to define them .his theory was so successful that , in effect , it killed off perfectly good earlier theories of ratio , and fowler 's aim had been to find the evidence for the rediscovery of these previous theories .in particular theaetetus -lrb- c 414-369bc -rrb- introduced a definition of ratio using a procedure called anthyphairesis , based on the euclidean subtraction algorithm .fowler developed his ideas in a series of papers , culminating in the book '' the mathematics of plato 's academy : a new reconstruction '' , which was published in 1987 .this book is based on a study of the primary sources and on their assimilation and transformation .