Abstract
To start at the beginning, as with many stories in mathematics, we go back to ancient Greece, and the “Greek miracle.” There were several Greek miracles, modern features that appeared as from nowhere. They may be related. There was the appearance of democracy, in Athens, around 500 BC. Around the same time philosophy emerged, reasoning by evidence and logical deduction about the great questions: what is our world made of, how and why does it change, how should we live? And mathematics that was formal and deductive.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Lazare Carnot, Géométrie de Position, Paris: Duprat, An XI, 1803.
Euclid, Euclid’s Elements, edited and translated by David Joyce, https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html, 1998.
Sir Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921; reissued by Dover, New York, 1981.
Victor Katz, A History of Mathematics: An Introduction 3rd edition, Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2009.
Wilbur Richard Knorr, The Ancient Tradition of Geometric Problems, Boston: Birkhauser, 1986.
Reviel Netz, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baltus, C. (2020). The Geometry of Euclid’s Elements . In: Collineations and Conic Sections. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46287-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46287-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-46286-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-46287-1
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)