Timeline for What happened to the original sources of Euclid's Elements?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 7, 2021 at 19:05 | comment | added | simplicio | @AlexandreEremenko Yea, but I mean we don't have any Classical mathematical works even as a copy, and even fragments and summaries from later authors are pretty scarce. As opposed to Hellenistic works like Euclids, where we have more or less complete works from several authors, often from multiple copies. So from that perspective its not really surprising Euclids for-bearers weren't transmitted, since basically all of classical mathematics suffered the same fate. | |
| Dec 7, 2021 at 14:01 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | @simplicio: the word "survive" in this context can have several meanings: a work can survive as an original, or later copies, or citations in the work of other authors. It is true that no original complete work from classical Greek or Hellenistic epoch survived. | |
| Dec 7, 2021 at 9:36 | comment | added | simplicio | Note that it isn't just Euclid's sources, no Classical Greek mathematics works survive. | |
| Sep 2, 2021 at 10:16 | comment | added | Moishe Kohan | @EuclidLookedOnBeautyBare For your first question, one knows things by learning through reading and thinking. In this case, by reading historians of the Antiquity. You realize what were the issues and people they were writing about, etc. As for your second question, I am responding to OP's sentence "Also, why didn’t the mathematicians after..." Personally, very few people of the period I would call a "mathematician," it would have been somebody who wrote a math book, like Diophantus. | |
| Aug 30, 2021 at 8:48 | comment | added | Euclid Looked On Beauty Bare | @MoisheKohan How do we know "we do not know"? What do you mean by "were these people mathematicians in any sense?" What makes a mathematician a mathematician? | |
| Aug 28, 2021 at 10:01 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | ||
| Aug 28, 2021 at 10:01 | |||||
| Aug 23, 2021 at 0:47 | comment | added | Moishe Kohan | @AryaMaroo: Sometimes the right answer is simply "we do not know." For instance, pick your favorite time frame, say, middle of the 2nd century AD and ask "Who copied previous copies of Euclid's elements? Were these people mathematicians in any sense? Did they understand what they copied? Did they copy any other math texts? How did they choose what to copy?" The answer to all these questions is "We do not know." | |
| Aug 22, 2021 at 5:00 | history | edited | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 20, 2021 at 22:53 | comment | added | vonbrand | @AryaMaroo, we only know about earlier texts by oblique comments, in the line of "Euclid wrote Elements, which is a systematization of what came before". Euclid's survived (in hand copies of hand copies of translations of...) because lots of people (i.e., probably in the few thousands) considered the text important. Copying a text like this requires understanding the subject matter (no mean feat when very few can even read and write at all) and spending a year or more of work. Here is a bit of the history of the text. | |
| Aug 20, 2021 at 15:30 | comment | added | vonbrand | Note that sometimes all that survives are short quotes elsewhere, much later translations (of translations), ... | |
| Aug 20, 2021 at 13:39 | comment | added | user14943 | Also, why didn’t the mathematicians after Euclid care to copy the works of Euclid's Predecessors. | |
| Aug 20, 2021 at 13:28 | comment | added | user14943 | Thank you! The answer definitely solves the problem! But, don't we know the exactly what happened to those texts by mathematicians before Euclid? | |
| Aug 20, 2021 at 12:56 | history | answered | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 4.0 |