Euclid's Elements - A 2,500 Year History
Bob Gardner
East Tennessee State University
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Johnson City, TN 37614
Euclid
Image from Wikipedia.
Euclid, who may have come from Athens, worked in Alexandria, Egypt. Little else is known about him. [Eves]
Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria in the Nile River delta in 332 BCE. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, one of his military leaders, Ptolemy, took over the region of Egypt. Ptolemy made Alexandria the capitol of his territory and started the University of Alexandria in about 300 BCE.
The Alexandrian Library, as portrayed in the 1980 PBS series Cosmos with Carl Sagan.
Image from:
From: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/alexandria-library-bibliotheca-alexandrina
The university had lecture rooms, laboratories, museums, and a library with over 600,000 papyrus scrolls. It is thought that this is where Euclid worked and, therefore, this is where his work The Elements was written.
What is known is based on a passage by Proclus in his commentary on The Elements:
"Not much younger than these (Hermotimus of Colophon and Philippus of Medma) is Euclid, who put together the Elements, collecting many of Eudoxus theorems, perfecting many of Theatetus', and also bringing to irrefragable demonstration the things which were only somewhat loosely proved by his predecessors. This man lived n the time of the first Ptolemy. For Archimedes, who came immediately after the first (Ptolemy), makes mention of Euclid: and, further, they say that Ptolemy once asked him if there was in geometry any shorter way than that of the elements, and he answered that there was no royal road to geometry. He is then younger than the pupils of Plato but older than Eratosthenes and Archimedes; for the latter were contemporary with one another, as Eratosthenes somewhere says" [Heath, page 1].
Even this information should taken with a degree of caution, however, since Proclus live around 700 years after Euclid.
Image from Wikipedia.
In fact, some think that there may not even have been a person named Euclid who was responsible for The Elements! Some think that he may have been the leader of a team which wrote The Elements, while others (granted, a minority) think that "Euclid" was the name of a collection of mathematicians who produced the work, rather like the 20th century French team going by the name "Nicolas Bourbaki" [Stewart, pages 19 and 20]. The Bourbaki team worked on organizing mathematical ideas within various fields and is responsible for a number of mathematical works which are still in print.
Go to the next section: The Content of The Elements.
Last revised November 14, 2009.
