Euclid
Chanel Coleman
Geometry / Period 2
Chanel
9/16/2010
My mathematician was Euclid, he is known as the father of geometry. Without Euclid a
lot of mathematic terms might not have been defined by now.
Euclid’s birth date and death is unknown but people have guessed his birth to be around
330 B.C, in Greece but no one knows for certain. Euclid studied under Plato in Athens. Later in
this life Ptolemy, another math mathematician, asked Euclid to teach in his university at
Alexandria Egypt. People that knew Euclid said that he was very nice and willing to help
anyone. When Euclid wrote he was very thorough and would prove facts that everyone else just
accepted as a fact. Other than these things not much is known about his personal life; all that is
really known about Euclid is where he taught in Egypt. Nobody even knows if Euclid was
creative or if he was just good at collecting and editing work of others.
One thing Euclid did for certain, was writing the book that sold more copies than any
other book besides the bible. This book is called The Elements. This book deals with almost
every math topic including irrational numbers, solid geometry, and number theory. In this book
Euclid is most known for geometry ideas such as axioms and theorems. He also set forth
methods for proofs and demonstrated logically 467 propositions in geometry. Euclid even came
up with the theorem of Pythagoras, and proved that this was true for every right triangle. Another
contribution that Euclid made was that he proved that there is no way to find the “largest prime
number”. This is because if you add 1 to the product of all the primes up to and including it you
will get yet another prime number. Euclid came up with 10 axioms or postulates that divided
evenly into two groups. The first five were called “Common Notions” because they applied to
everything. While the second group was mainly towards geometry only, most of these postulates
we have already gone over in class. All of these postulates you have heard of in some shape, size
or form. The ones called Common Notions are as follows; 1.things which are equal to the same
thing are also equal to one another 2.If equals are added to equals, the sums are equal 3.If equals
are subtracted from equals, the remainders are equal 4. Things which coincide with one another
are equal to one another and 5.whole is greater than the part.
Above is a picture of two simple geometric figures that Euclid explained on how to solve in his book Elements.
Euclid had a lot of other work as well, they just weren’t noticed as much as his Elements
book. Some other work Euclid wrote are books entitled Data, On Division, and Phaenomena.
The book Data talks about geometry and propositions. On Division is also about geometry but
more general problems of division and dividing figures into different parts. The work Euclid did
called Phaenomena is for what’s known today as the geometry of spheres for the use in
astronomy. The last piece of work that Euclid created was called Porisms. Porisms are problems
that aren’t fully developed into theorems yet. This is something that deals with bringing out
another feature that already exists.
Sources
http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/bios/b2euclid.htm
http://www.mathopenref.com/euclid.html
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Du-Fi/Euclid.html
http://ww.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0817817.html