Euclid

There is not much information and records relating to Euclid’s personal life but historians believe that he breathed his last around 260 B.C.

His most famous book “The Element” was eventually translated from Arabic to Latin by Campanus. The first printed addition of the same appeared in 1482 in Venice.

In 1570, John Dee translated “The Element” in English. Dee’s lectures were able to revive interest in mathematics in England.

Very little information is available about Euclid but it is presumed that he was born around 330 B.C in Tyre. Going by the accounts of certain Arabic authors, he came from a rich background. His father was “Naucrates” while his grandfather was Zenarchus.

It is said that he was a Greek born in Tyre and lived in Damascus throughout his life. However, there is no certain evidence if he was the same person as Euclid of Alexandria is often confused with Euclid of Megara, another man who was a philosopher and lived at the time of Plato.

Since lack of biographical information is rather unusual for this period, many researchers believe that Euclid may have not existed at all and, in fact, his works may have been written by a team of mathematicians who took the name Euclid. But this hypothesis is again rejected by scholars, citing lack of solid evidence.

It is also said that he studied in Plato’s ancient school in Athens, a place that was only meant for affluent people. He got his mathematical training from the students of Plato.

Euclid’s ‘Elements’ is considered as one of the most influential works in the history of mathematics, from the time of its publication until the late 19th or early 20th century. It actually served as the main textbook for teaching mathematics during this period.

In his Elements, he deduced the principles of ‘Euclidean geometry’ from a small set of axioms. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory and rigor.

In addition to his most famous work ‘Elements’, there are at least five works of Euclid that have survived to this day. They seem to follow the same logical structure as followed in Elements. They are ‘Data’, ‘On Divisions of Figures', 'Catoptrics', 'Phaenomena' and 'Optics'.

In addition to the abovementioned works, there are a few other works that are attributed to Euclid but have been lost. These works include ‘Conics’, ‘Pseudaria’, ‘Porisms’, ‘Surface Loci’ and ‘On the Heavy and the Light’.

‘Elements’ is a mathematical and geometric treatise consisting of 13 books written by this great ancient Greek mathematician in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt c. 300 BC.

Euclid’s ‘Elements’ is a collection of definitions, postulates, theorems and constructions and also the mathematical proofs of the propositions. All the 13 books cover Euclidean geometry and the ancient Greek elementary number theory.

It also includes geometric algebra, which helps in solving many algebraic problems, including the problem of finding the square root of a number.

The Elements is the second oldest existing Greek mathematical treatise after Autolycus' ‘On the Moving Sphere’ and has proven instrumental in the development of logic and modern science.

First time printed in 1482 in Venice, ‘Elements’ is one of the very earliest mathematical works to be printed after the invention of the printing press.