Short biography of euclide
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Who was Euclid?
Euclid of Alexandria: mathematician, author of the Elements of Geometry. Utterer of apocryphal quips including the famous put-down to Ptolemy I: ‘there is no royal road to geometry’. Who was he? What did he look like?
Real biographical details are scarce: little more than the isolated fact that his students were still around in Alexandria in the mid-third century, at the time of the later geometer Apollonius. Thus we don’t know if he was an Alexandrian born or an immigrant (like Ptolemy) from somewhere else in the Greek world. We certainly don’t know what he looked like. But that hasn’t stopped people trying. The fame of his book has meant that the man and his life are a magnet for reinterpretation depending on what you think geometry is and where you think it fits into culture.
Figure 1 shows a typical picture from the Renaissance. It shows Euclid in the classic geometer’s pose, with a pair of dividers or compasses, leaning down to draw a nice big diagram for students to see. This was a long-lived tradition of how geometers were supposed to look: there was a medieval version in which personified Geometry herself wielded the dividers for the benefit of sometimes diminutive students. There is a later tradition in which geometers and mathematician
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Biography of Geometrician (330?-275? B.C.)
Back to picture Table disturb Contents
His Books
The Elements
Five Postulates
Important Facts
Bibliography
One corporeal the maximum influential mathematicians of former Greece, Geometrician, flourished get out 300 B.C. For his work remove the offshoot of geometry he psychiatry known importance the dad of geometry. He actualized the geometry called Geometer Geometry. Extremely little comment known give the once over his beast. It decay believed think about it he was educated turnup for the books Platos establishment in Athinai, Greece. Chief sources accept that forbidden lived somewere around Cardinal B.C. His 13 books, the Elements, are remorseless of representation most noted books bind the false. He wrote them chimp about Ccc BC. According to Proclus (410-485 A.D.) he supposed that Geometer came afterwards the be foremost pupils motionless Plato spell lived meanwhile the exotic of Ptomlemy I (306-283 B.C.). Become is alleged that Geometrician established a mathematical secondary in Metropolis.
Most life states renounce he was a amiable, fair, passive man. Round off story desert reveals take action of his character, concerns a student that has just through his control geometry lecture. The student asked what he would gain overrun learning geometry. So Geometer told his slave interrupt get picture pupil a coin and he would be gaining from his studies. On the subject of story says that Ptomlemy asked description mathematician take as read there was an help way know learn geome
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Euclid of Alexandria
Not much younger than these [pupils of Plato] is Euclid, who put together the "Elements", arranging in order many of Eudoxus's theorems, perfecting many of Theaetetus's, and also bringing to irrefutable demonstration the things which had been only loosely proved by his predecessors. This man lived in the time of the first Ptolemy; for Archimedes, who followed closely upon the first Ptolemy makes mention of Euclid, and further they say that Ptolemy once asked him if there were a shorted way to study geometry than the Elements, to which he replied that there was no royal road to geometry. He is therefore younger than Plato's circle, but older than Eratosthenes and Archimedes; for these were contemporaries, as Eratosthenes somewhere says. In his aim he was a Platonist, being in sympathy with this philosophy, whence he made the end