SERENUS "of Antissa," Greek geometer, probably not of Antissa but of Antinoeia or Antinoupolis, a city in Egypt founded by Hadrian, lived most probably in the 4th century, between. Pappus and Theon of Alexandria. Two treatises of his have sur vived, viz., On the Section of the Cylinder and On the Section of the Cone, the Greek text of which was first edited by Edmund Halley along with his Apollonius (Oxford, 171o), and is now available in a definitive critical edition by J. L. Heiberg (Sereni Antissensis Opuscula, Leipzig, 1896). A Latin translation by Commandinus appeared at Bologna in 1566, and a German trans lation by E. Nizze in 1860-61 (Stralsund). Besides these works Serenus wrote commentaries on Apollonius, and in certain mss. of Theon of Smyrna there appears a proposition "of Serenus the philosopher, from the Lemmas" to the effect that, if a number of rectilineal angles be subtended, at a point on a diameter of a circle which is not the centre, by equal arcs of that circle, the angle nearer to the centre is less than the angle more remote.
The book On the Section of the Cylinder states as its primary object the correction of an error on the part of certain geometers of the time who supposed that the transverse sections of a cylinder were different from the elliptic sections of a cone. When this has been done, Serenus shows (Prop. 20) that "it is possible to exhibit a cone and a cylinder cutting one another in one and the same ellipse." Other propositions naturally deal with subcontrary and other circular sections of a scalene cylinder or cone.
The treatise On the Section of the Cone, though Serenus claims originality for it, is unimportant. (T. L. H.)