Protestant and Catholic versions of Euclid's Elements aside, is Euclid's Elements a regular math book? I'd never heard about it until I came to my traditional parish, and I've been intrigued ever since.
Sort of. I begin teaching it tomorrow! It's a geometry book from around 300 BC and leads the reader systematically from basic properties we can all intuit about the world through basic geometry into algebra (but before it was called algebra and using lines rather than numbers) to, at the end, constructing what was for Euclid, the basic building blocks of chemistry.
The most unique thing about it is the almost complete lack of numbers as we've come to understand them. Euclid includes no numerals, next to no counting, no fractions, etc., and uses arrangements and shapes to compare different lines that lead one to a more intuitive sense of why things in the world are true and not just that they are true.
Protestant and Catholic versions of Euclid's Elements aside, is Euclid's Elements a regular math book? I'd never heard about it until I came to my traditional parish, and I've been intrigued ever since.
Sort of. I begin teaching it tomorrow! It's a geometry book from around 300 BC and leads the reader systematically from basic properties we can all intuit about the world through basic geometry into algebra (but before it was called algebra and using lines rather than numbers) to, at the end, constructing what was for Euclid, the basic building blocks of chemistry.
The most unique thing about it is the almost complete lack of numbers as we've come to understand them. Euclid includes no numerals, next to no counting, no fractions, etc., and uses arrangements and shapes to compare different lines that lead one to a more intuitive sense of why things in the world are true and not just that they are true.
Here's an online version: https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/elements/elements.html (Be warned, it is a Protestant version!)
How interesting! Thank you for explaining it to me! How's the teaching job going so far?
Why read Euclid at all. In Christ we have died to the Elements! (Colossians 2:20)
Same greek word. Thanks for the like! I feel seen.
😀😀😀