Euclid Of Alexandria Quotes

It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry.

Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand.

Euclid's Elements has been for nearly twenty-two centuries the encouragement and guide of that scientific thought which is one thing with the progress of man from a worse to a better state. The encouragement; for it contained a body of knowledge that was really known and could be relied on, and that moreover was growing in extent and application. For even at the time this book was written—shortly after the foundation of the Alexandrian Museum—Mathematics was no longer the merely ideal science of the Platonic school, but had started on her career of conquest over the whole world of Phenomena. The guide; for the aim of every scientific student of every subject was to bring his knowledge of that subject into a form as perfect as that which geometry had attained. Far up on the great mountain of Truth, which all the sciences hope to scale, the foremost of that sacred sisterhood was seen, beckoning for the rest to follow her.

Sadly, we know almost nothing about Euclid (c. 325-c. 265 BCE).32 We know even less about him than we do about Pythagoras, and what little we do know has been hotly contested by scholars. Euclid wrote at least ten books, only half of which have survived. A number of mutually consistent indications suggest that he lived after Aristotle and before Archimedes. He was one of the first mathematicians at the great library of Alexandria and there had gathered a group of talented mathematicians about him. Legends about him abound, many as (possibly apocryphal) insertions in other mathematicians' works. One tells that Ptolemy asked Euclid for a quick way to master geometry and received the reply, "There is no royal road to geometry." Another tells of a student who, after encountering the first proposition in the Elements, asked Euclid what practical use studying geometry could have. The mathematician allegedly turned to his slave and replied dismissively, "Slave, give this boy a threepence, since he must make gain of what he learns.

Euclid, who was still, when I was young, the sole acknowledged text-book of geometry for boys, lived in Alexandria, about 300 B.C., a few years after the death of Alexander and Aristotle.

Any mathematician in Alexandria in the third century BCE could point out that his Elements contained nothing new.15 What Euclid did was to set out principles that were known so clearly and elegantly that it became the most reproduced book in the ancient and medieval world, even more than the Bible.16 It remained the fundamental textbook for teaching geometry to young minds right through the nineteenth century. Minds as diverse as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and Charles Darwin would get their first whiff of what scientific reasoning is all about from the pages of the Elements.

The fate of the books and all their vast numbers, is epitomized in the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt and the commercial hub of the Eastern Mediterranean. The city had many tourist attractions, including an impressive theater and red light district. But visitors always took note of something quite exceptional, in the center of the city, at the lavish site known as "the museum" most of the intellectual inherits of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian and Jewish cultures ad been assembled at enormous costs and carefully archived for researched. Starting as early as 300BCE, the Ptolemaic Kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at their museum...The recipients of this largess established remarkably high intellectual standards. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria, Archimedes discovered Pi and laid the foundation of calculus.

As with so many analytical observations, the golden ratio has its origins in ancient Greece but we cannot be sure who identified it first—possibly many generations before Euclid of Alexandria defined it in the sixth book of his Elements: “A line is divided in extreme and mean ratio” if a + b is to a as a is to b.75 In plain English, divide a line in such a way that the ratio between the line and the longer of the two pieces will be the same as the ratio between the longer and the shorter piece. Restated in a more rigorous way, a line segment of length 1 is divided in two pieces whereby (1 / x) = x / (1 – x) or (x2 + x) – 1 = 0. Solving this equation means that x equals approximately 0.618033988.

The Alexandria universities were also the home to many famous mathematicians such as Apollonios, Euclid, and Archimedes. Famous inventors also underwent their studies there, such as Ktesibios (who created the water clock) and Heron (who designed the model steam engine).