Kosmas Balanos

Kosmas Balanos (1731–1808) was a Greek mathematician, author and school director. He continued the work of his father Balanos Vasilopoulos,

Life He was born in Ioannina, a center of the 17th–18th-century modern Greek Enlightenment movement. Balanos was the first son of the scholar Balanos Vasilopoulos and became a priest like his father had done before him. During the 1790s, the Gouma school faced serious financial difficulties, but Balanos managed to find new sponsors among the prosperous Ioannite diaspora and especially the Zosimades brothers. After about 40 years in the Gouma school, Balanos left his post in 1799 to his brother Konstantinos.

Work In 1798 Balanos published in Vienna the work Έκθεσις συνοπτικής αριθμητικής, αλγέβρης και χρονολογίας (Concise Exposition of Arithmetics, Algebra and Chronology). He wrote the philosophical work Περί ελλείψεως των παραλειπομένων φωτών παρά τοις αρίστοις των ποιητών και των καταλογάδην συγγραψάντων (On the omission of the unmentioned lights by the excellent among the poets and among those whο wrote prose). Moreover, he composed theological and philosophical works, as well as school textbooks. Many of these works remained unpublished and were burned with the destruction of the Balanos family library during Ali Pasha's defeat by the Sultan's forces in 1822.