Euclid was born about 365 BC in Alexandria, Egypt and died about 300 BC. Euclid was best known for his treatise on geometry (The Elements). The long lasting nature of The Elements must make Euclid the leading mathematician of all time. But little is known of Euclid’s life except that he taught at Alexandria in Egypt. The ElementsEuclid’s most famous work is his treatise on geometry called The Elements.
The book was a compilation of geometrical knowledge that became the centre of mathematical teaching for 2000 years. Probably no results in The Elements were first proved by Euclid but the organization of the material and its exposition are certainly due to him. The Elements begins with definitions and axioms, including the famous fifth, or parallel, postulate that one and only one line can be drawn through a point parallel to a given line. Euclid’s decision to make this an axiom led to Euclidean geometry. It was not until the 19th century that this axiom was dropped and non-Euclidean geometry’s were studied.
The Elements is divided into 13 books. Books 1-6, plane geometry: books 7-9, number theory: book 10, Exodus’s theory of irrational numbers: books 11-13, solid geometry. The book ends with a discussion of the properties of the five regular polyhedral and a proof that there are precisely five. More than one thousand editions of The Elements have been published since it was first printed in 1482. The Elements HelpfulnessThe Elements were obviously helpful because Zeno of Sidon about 250 years after Euclid wrote The Elements, seems to have been the first to show that Euclid’s propositions were not deduced from the axioms alone, and Euclid does make other subtle assumptions.
Other Publishing of EuclidEuclid also wrote Data, On Divisions, Optics and Phenomena which have survived. His other books Surface Loci, Porisms, Conics, Book of Fallacies and Elements of Music have all been lost. The book on Data had 94 propositions. This is why The Elements make Euclid the best mathematician. Famous Quotations by EuclidThere are 3 quotations that make him outstanding one is “There is no royal road to geometry. ” Another was said while Euclid was teaching a young boy to read geometry “What do I get from learning these things?” So Euclid called a slave and said “Give him threepence, since he must make a gain out of what learns.
The last quotation was in the 5th proposition and it is that if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles are less than two right angles.
