托马斯·利特尔·希思 · Vinony

托马斯·利特尔·希思 · Vinony

Quotes

“An edition is... still wanted which shall, while in some places adhering... to the original text, at the same time be so entirely remodelled by the aid of accepted modern notation as to be thoroughly readable by any competent mathematician, and this want it is the object of the present work to supply.”
“Any satisfactory reproduction of the Conics must fulfil certain essential conditions: (1) it should be Apollonius and nothing but Apollonius, and nothing should be altered either in the substance or in the order of his thought, (2) it should be complete, leaving out nothing of any significance or importance, (3) it should exhibit under different headings the successive divisions of the subject, so that the definite scheme followed by the author may be seen as a whole.”
“Once the first principles are disposed of, the body of doctrine contained in the recent textbooks of elementary geometry does not, and from the nature of the case cannot, show any substantial differences from that set forth in the Elements.”
“Euclid's work will live long after all the text books of the present day are superseded and forgotten. It is one of the noblest monuments of antiquity; no mathematician worthy of the name can afford not to know Euclid, the real Euclid as distinct from any revised or rewritten versions which will serve for schoolboys or engineers. And, to know Euclid, it is necessary to know his language, and, so far as it can be traced, the history of the "elements" which he collected in his immortal work.”
“It is to be feared that few who are not experts in the history of mathematics have any acquaintance with the details of the original discoveries in mathematics of the greatest mathematician of antiquity, perhaps the greatest mathematical genius that the world has ever seen.”
“Archimedes is said to have requested his friends and relatives to place upon his tomb a representation of a cylinder circumscribing a sphere within it, together with the inscription giving the ratio (3/2) which the cylinder bears to the sphere; from which we may infer that he himself regarded the discovery of this ration as his greatest achievement.”

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