Sunday, August 14

Scored a nice find at the used book store, Euclid’s, Elements, all 13 books complete in one volume.  I used to have the Dover three volume set but recycled them for space then regretted it.  Euclid may have been the most celebrated mathematician of all time.  He lived in Greece during the third or fourth century B.C.E. 

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay said that, “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”  We probably remember him from high school geometry class and all those theorems, proofs and postulates.

Monday, August 15

Euclid received his training in Greece, but worked in Alexandria, home of the great library that would eventually burn in war.

Theorem – A proposition not self-evident but proved by a chain of reasoning.