Euclid as imagined by Justus van Gent (c. 1474), Studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro. Source · Public domain
About Euclid
Euclid was a Greek mathematician who taught at Alexandria in Egypt around 300 BCE, probably in the reign of Ptolemy I. Almost nothing certain is known of his life; the main ancient report comes from Proclus, a fifth-century CE commentator on Book I. Besides the thirteen books of the Elements, works attributed to him include the Data, the Optics and the Phaenomena. The Elements gathered and ordered the geometry of earlier Greek mathematicians into a single deductive system, and it was copied, translated and taught for more than two thousand years.
Book I of Euclid's Elements, composed at Alexandria around 300 BCE, is the opening of the most widely studied mathematics textbook in history. It builds the geometry of straight lines, angles, triangles and parallelograms from a short list of starting points, and it ends with the theorem now named for Pythagoras and its converse.
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