Re: SUO: Re: Building, Sharing, and Merging Ontologies
Jon,
Yes, it's quite likely that Plato, Aristotle, and their
gang(s) may have drawn trees, but as far as I know, the
earliest example is in a manuscript by Porphyry (but it is
not known for certain whether Porphyry or one of his readers
was the one who actually drew it).
>You may wish to note, though we have no extant record
>of whether Plato drew the figure for it, that there
>is an approximately binary tree of roughly depth 10
>implied in the dialogue of the 'Sophist'. It's been
>a while, but I did draw the figure of it once and even
>loaded it into my tree-processing program many years ago,
>anyway, as I recall there are some ternary divisions and,
>of course, many of the terminal leaves are identified or
>quotient out in the hypostasis of the Sophist himself,
>but that is the gist of it.
If you or anyone else can find any further evidence about
the first person who drew a tree diagram, please let us know.
Hesiod, by the way, wrote the first documented example of
a push-down stack: When Kronos was trying to swallow all
of his children, Zeus was still an infant, and his mother
wrapped a rock in swaddling clothes. When Kronos swallowed
the rock, he got indigestion and threw them up in reverse order.
If you go to Delphi, you can see the actual rock -- which
proves that the story is true.
John