Thomas Little Heath

If one would understand the Greek genius fully, it would be a good plan to begin with their geometry.

Aristotle would... by no means admit that mathematics was divorced from aesthetic; he could conceive, he said, of nothing more beautiful than the objects of mathematics.

Greek mathematics reveals an important aspect of the Greek genius of which the student of Greek culture is apt to lose sight.

For the mathematician the important consideration is that the foundations of mathematics and a great portion of its content are Greek. The Greeks laid down the first principles, invented the methods ab initio, and fixed the terminology. …

It is... the author's confident hope that this book will give a fresh interest to the story of Greek mathematics in the eyes both of mathematicians and of classical scholars.

Hippocrates... is said to have proved the theorem that circles are to one another as the squares on their diameters, and it is difficult to see how he could have done this except by some form, or anticipation, of the method [of exhaustion].

Eudoxus was perhaps the greatest of all Archimedes's predecessors, and it is his achievements, especially the discovery of the method of exhaustion, which interest us in connexion with Archimedes.

The problem of doubling the cube was henceforth tried exclusively in the form of the problem of the two mean proportionals.

Almost the whole of Greek science and philosophy begins with Thales.

In illustration of his entire preoccupation with his studies, we are told that he would forget all about his food and such necessities of life, and would be drawing geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, or, when anointing himself, …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …