British Versions of Book II of Euclid’s Elements: Geometry, Arithmetic, Algebra (1550–1750)

Leo Corry

sht 2022 · Springer Nature

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This book discusses the changing conceptions about the relationship between geometry and arithmetic within the Euclidean tradition that developed in the British context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Its focus is on Book II of the Elements and the ways in which algebraic symbolism and methods, especially as recently introduced by François Viète and his followers, took center stage as mediators between the two realms, and thus offered new avenues to work out that relationship in idiosyncratic ways not found in earlier editions of the Euclidean text. Texts examined include Robert Recorde's Pathway to Knowledge (1551), Henry Billingsley’s first English translation of the Elements (1570), Clavis Mathematicae by William Oughtred and Artis Analyticae Praxis by Thomas Harriot (both published in 1631), Isaac Barrow’s versions of the Elements (1660), and John Wallis Treatise of Algebra (1685), and the English translations of Claude Dechales’ French Euclidean Elements (1685).

This book offers a completely new perspective of the topic and analyzes mostly unexplored material. It will be of interest to historians of mathematics, mathematicians with an interest in history and historians of renaissance science in general.

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Leo Corry is a historian of science working at Tel Aviv University. He has published extensively on the history of mathematics, physics and computing, since the turn of the twentieth century, as well as on medieval mathematics.

He has published two books in the SpringerBriefs Series, as well as one book with Kluwer, one with Birhauser, one with Oxford UP. He also has a very long list of published articles and book chapters.

He was editor of Science in Cintext (published at Cambridge UP).