It is generally accepted by scholars that there were different traditions within ancient Greek mathematics – theoretical and practical, axiomatico-deductive and applied. My paper will try to explore the way in which mathematical problems were set out and solved which involved specific numbers, quantities, or geometrical magnitudes which had been assigned a specific measure. In other words, I will try to cast some light on the relatively under-explored tradition of the mathematics of the ‘particular’. Given the state of the evidence, my sources will be in Greek, but from Egypt, and from later periods than the 5th or 4th century BCE, but similar mathematical
practices can be postulated for classical Greece as well. My main question in this paper will be, what kind of mathematical knowledge is constituted by the specific, the particular, the ‘case’, such as we find in the sources I will be looking at, and what contexts was it practised in, in particular, contexts of teaching and learning.