Born in Beirut, Lebanon to medical missionary parents in 1932, Malcolm Brown was raised in Buffalo, New York where he attended the Nichols School.  After one college year at Haverford, he attended Amherst College where he began as a pre-med major, but graduated in 1953 with a degree in Philosophy.  He pursued graduate work at Columbia University, specialising in Ancient Greek Philosophy and earning a doctorate in 1966.  His dissertation was “Plato’s Theory of Knowledge and its Mathematical Background”. 

 

For the next 20 years, he taught University level courses in philosophy, mathematics, classics and history of science at a variety of institutions including St. John’s College Annapolis, Reed College and Barnard.  His final 17 years of teaching and research were at Brooklyn College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.  In 1970 he spent a year as a junior fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies, enlarging the scope of his research into mathematics at the Old Academy.  In the 1970’s and early 1980’s Brown published and presented papers at scholarly conferences in the U.S., France and England.  The subjects were all in Ancient Greek Philosophy and in the History of Greek Mathematics.   

 

Brown was at the forefront of computer-assisted research in the humanities, working from 1975 on a set of electronically stored concordances to the early Greek mathematicians.  These included Euclid (his Elements) and all of the extant writing from his predecessors still extant.   The purpose was to identify various authors’ hands within Euclid’s text through computer-assisted analysis of texts.  This method of textual analysis built on the work of a handful of other scholars, but extended it in several innovative directions.  His specialised work on the mathematicians pre-dated that of the TLG and his were the first texts of this type to be added to early database collections at City University of New York, Dartmouth, University of Warwick, Rutgers and Oxford.  He also communicated his results to individual scholars at Harvard, University of Chicago and Queen Mary College London.  His texts were widely available to scholars by the late 1970’s. 

 

In 1987, he took early retirement from his academic duties in order to pursue full-time his other interests, notably beekeeping, public radio broadcasting and alternative energy production.  In the mid eighties, he purchased and renovated a small dam in Jeffersonville, New York and in 1986 his retrofitted mini-hydro plant went online, Jeffersonville Hydroelectric by name.  For the following 12 years it supplied approximately 15 householdsworth of wholesale electric power to the local private utility, NY State Electric and Gas.  In 1990, along with his wife Anne Larsen, he founded an NPR radio station and got it federally licensed under the call sign WJFF-FM.  Powered by ‘Jeff Hydro’, Radio Catskill’s two-story studio was built entirely with volunteer labor.   It was built on property owned by the hydroplant, and its studios were built just 25 meters uphill from it.

 

This community station chose all of its own programming, and claimed – then and now -- uniqueness in this country’s public radio system.  It was and is unique in drawing the bulk of its power needs from homegrown renewable energy.   The station retains its autonomy today by setting its own policies and programming through citizen boards and committees exclusively, these being composed entirely of local residents.  Further information and live-streaming radio is available at www.wjffradio.org.   After moving to Hull Massachusetts in the late 1990’s, Brown took initiatives to cause windturbines to be installed, and to be financed by local public funds.  More information on this project is at  www.hullwind.org.   

 

Three chapters of Brown’s dissertation were published by 1972, on Meno, on “Equal” in Phaedo and on the paradox-troubled subject of infinite process mathematics in Theaetetus.   After several years’ work compiling computer-readable texts of Euclid and his predecessors at or near the Old Academy, he published interim results (1987) about “dunamis” (in this case “third power”) and the text of Politicus 266 AB where he detects an echo of this advanced topic.  He also urged colleagues to continue computer-assisted research on the Old Academy, and to decipher the Sisyphus.  At the same time he took himself away, retired from teaching, and worked on renewable energy projects (a hydropower and a public radio project in the Catskills and a windpower project in eastern Massachusetts.  

 

In 2004 he returned to his scholarly tasks.  He delivered that year’s Rosamond Sprague Lecture in South Carolina, and announced his plan to put up the A.E. Taylor translation of Plato’s Theaetetus.  This, alongside other computer-assisted findings, was to be put up on a website, which would be  named  www.theaetetus.net. 

 

The title of Brown’s Sprague Lecture was “Theaetetus, the Man and his Work: recovering some fragments of Theaetetus”.  A revised version of that lecture appears here.  Also here is the full Taylor translation of this dialogue of Plato’s.  Taylor had not completed this work, but had done a full translation and notes up to Stephanus 183b.  Further, this site is to contain other research on mathematical and scientific writing at the Old Academy.   Some of this work is problematic in its authorship attribution, and some survives only in fragmentary form.   Scholia to our best MSS of Euclid, -- which have helped in relaying one of Theaetetus’ fragments -- may relay other fragmentary material from the Old Academy.

 

Brown intends that at least some pages on this website should be kept ‘open’ in the mode of ‘wiki’ composition.  This requires the author pro tem to be willing to yield to his or her successor author, the evolving text being the beneficiary.  Brown was recently heard to say “preserving this openness makes the remark which Plato puts into the mouth of the boy Theaetetus aim at all of us.  The remark was ‘if I make an error, you will correct me’ ”.   

 

Click here to contact Malcolm.