EUCLID (ABOUT 300 B.C.)
Our present concern is with that first wonderful
development of scientific activity which began under
the first Ptolemy, and which presents, in the course of
the first century of Alexandrian influence, the most
remarkable coterie of scientific workers and thinkers
that antiquity produced. The earliest group of these
new leaders in science had at its head a man whose
name has been a household word ever since. This was
Euclid, the father of systematic geometry. Tradition
has preserved to us but little of the personality of this
remarkable teacher; but, on the other hand, his most
important work has come down to us in its entirety.
The
Elements of Geometry, with which the name of
Euclid is associated in the mind of every school-boy,
presented the chief propositions of its subject in so simple
and logical a form that the work remained a textbook
everywhere for more than two thousand years.
Indeed it is only now beginning to be superseded. It
is not twenty years since English mathematicians
could deplore the fact that, despite certain rather obvious
defects of the work of Euclid, no better textbook
than this was available. Euclid's work, of course,
gives expression to much knowledge that did not originate
with him. We have already seen that several important
propositions of geometry had been developed
by Thales, and one by Pythagoras, and that the rudiments
of the subject were at least as old as Egyptian
civilization. Precisely how much Euclid added
through his own investigations cannot be ascertained.
It seems probable that he was a diffuser of knowledge
rather than an originator, but as a great teacher his
fame is secure. He is credited with an epigram which
in itself might insure him perpetuity of fame: "There is
no royal road to geometry,'' was his answer to Ptolemy
when that ruler had questioned whether the
Elements
might not be simplified. Doubtless this, like most
similar good sayings, is apocryphal; but whoever
invented it has made the world his debtor.
