London: C. J. CLAY AND SON, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AVE MARIA LANE. Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO. Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS. OF GREEK MATHEMATICS BY JAMES GOW, M.A. FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. Παρ ̓ Εὐκλείδῃ τις ἀρξάμενος γεωμετρεῖν, ὡς τὸ πρῶτον θεώρημα ἔμαθεν, STOBAEUS, Flor. IV. p. 205. EDITED FOR THE SYNDICS OF THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. CAMBRIDGE: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1884 Storage Undergraduate Library QA 22 •G722s Cambridge: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SON, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. THE history of Greek mathematics is, for the most part, only the history of such mathematics as are learnt daily in all our public schools. And very singular it is that, though England is the only European country which still retains Euclid as its teacher of elementary geometry, and though Cambridge, at least, has, for more than a century, required from all candidates for any degree as much Greek and mathematics together as should make this book intelligible and interesting, yet no Englishman has been at the pains of writing, or even of translating, such a treatise. If it was not wanted, as it ought to have been, by our classical professors and our mathematicians, it would have served at any rate to quicken, with some human interest, the melancholy labours of our schoolboys. The work, as usual, has been left to Germany and even to France, and it has been done there with more than usual excellence. It demanded a combination of learning, scholarship and common sense which we used, absurdly enough, to regard as peculiarly English. If anyone still cherishes this patriotic delusion, I would advise him to look at the works of Nesselmann, Bretschneider, Hankel, Hultsch, Heiberg and Cantor, or, again, of Montucla, Delambre and Chasles, which are so frequently cited in the following pages. To match them we can show only an ill-arranged treatise of Dean Peacock, many brilliant but scattered articles of Prof. De Morgan, and three essays by Dr Allman. I have treated all these writers with |