Thomas Little Heath
Thomas Little Heath
Sir Thomas Little Heath was a British civil servant, mathematician, classical scholar, historian of ancient Greek mathematics, translator, and mountaineer. He was educated at Clifton College in Bristol. Heath translated works of Euclid of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga, Aristarchus of Samos, and Archimedes of Syracuse into English.
"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."
"The actual writers of Elements of whom we hear were the following. Leon, a little younger than Eudoxus, was the author of a collection of propositions more numerous and more serviceable than those collected by Hippocrates. Theudius of Magnesia, a contemporary of Menæchmus and Dinostratus, "put together the elements admirably, making many partial or limited propositions more general". Theudiuss book was no doubt the geometrical text-book of the Academy and that used by Aristotle."
"Eudoxus was perhaps the greatest of all Archimedess predecessors, and it is his achievements, especially the discovery of the method of exhaustion, which interest us in connexion with Archimedes."
"The best history of Greek mathematics which exists at present is undoubtedly that of Gino Loria under the title Le scienze esatte nell antica Grecia (second edition 1914...) ...the arrangement is chronological ...they raise the question whether in a history of this kind it is best to follow chronological order or to arrange the material according to subjects... I have adopted a new arrangement, mainly according to subjects..."
"The work Was begun in 1913, but the bulk of it was written, as a distraction, during the first three years of the war, the hideous course of which seemed day by day to enforce the profound truth conveyed in the answer of Plato to the Delians. When they consulted him on the problem set them by the Oracle, namely that of duplicating the cube, he replied, It must be supposed, not that the god specially wished this problem solved, but that he would have the Greeks desist from war and wickedness and cultivate the Muses, so that, their passions being assuaged by philosophy and mathematics, they might live in innocent and mutually helpful intercourse with one another. Truly,Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystàlline sea Of thought and its eternity."
"While then for a long time everyone was at a loss, Hippocrates of Chios was the first to observe that, if between two straight lines of which the greater is double of the less it were discovered how to find two mean proportionals in continued proportion, the cube would be doubled; and thus he turned the difficulty in the original problem into another difficulty no less than the former. Afterwards, they say, some Delians attempting, in accordance with an oracle, to double one of the altars fell into the same difficulty. And they sent and begged the geometers who were with Plato in the Academy to find for them the required solution. And while they set themselves energetically to work and sought to find two means between two given straight lines, Archytas of Tarentum is said to have discovered them by means of half-cylinders, and Eudoxus by means of the so-called curved lines. It is, however, characteristic of them all that they indeed gave demonstrations, but were unable to make the actual construction or to reach the point of practical application, except to a small extent Menaechmus and that with difficulty."
