Creator of the first Scientific Publication
About 40 works in various disciplines have been attributed to Anania, but only half are extant.
Anania Shirakatsi (Old Armenian: Անանիա Շիրակացի, Anania Širakac’i, anglicized: Ananias of Shirak) was a 7th-century Armenian polymath and natural philosopher, author of extant works covering mathematics, astronomy, geography, chronology, and other fields. Little is known for certain of his life outside of his own writings, but he is considered the father of the exact and natural sciences in Armenia—the first Armenian mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer.
A part of the Armenian Hellenizing School and one of the few secular scholars in medieval Armenia, Anania was educated primarily by Tychicus, in Trebizond. He composed science textbooks and the first known geographic work in classical Armenian (Ashkharhatsuyts), which provides detailed information about Greater Armenia, Persia and the Caucasus.
In mathematics, his accomplishments include the earliest known table of results of the four basic operations, the earliest known collection of recreational math puzzles and problems, and the earliest book of math problems in Armenian. He also devised a system of mathematical notation based on the Armenian alphabet, although he was the only writer known to have used it.
Name
His name is usually anglicized as Ananias of Shirak (Širak). Anania is the Armenian variant of the biblical name Ananias, itself the Greek version of the Hebrew Hananiah. The second part of his name denotes his place of origin, the region of Shirak, though it may have become a sort of surname. In some manuscripts, he is called Shirakuni (Շիրակունի) and Shirakavants’i (Շիրակաւանցի).
See also Le Courrier d’Erevan
