Thread 24625162

I want to try reading Euclid's Elements. Which translation is the best?

>>24625162 (OP)
>translation
Do I have to say it?

>>24625169
the pseud has arrived.

>>24625162 (OP)
Thomas Taylor

>>24625162 (OP)
Emily Wilson

>>24625162 (OP)
>I want to try reading Euclid's Elements. Which translation is the best?

Commentary, The classic Dover edition is a three-volume set that includes Heath's extensive and valuable historical and scholarly commentary.

Richard fitzpatrick

>>24625162 (OP)

The Heath edition contains extended commentary and has taken on the status of the standard English edition.

Links to books are appreciated. Also general discussion of Euclidean Geometry. Did anyone read Elements? Thoughts on it? Thoughts on the various online materials that exist on Euclid's Elements or Euclidean Geometry? Thoughts on Discrete Mathematics books? They seem to have some of the axiom theorem proofs stuff perhaps.

>>24625459
Generally "discrete math" is a non-mathematician's all-round freshman education to get them up to speed with various techniques without much rigor. If you want rigor, you'll want to read books on specific fields of pure mathematics, written for the pure mathematician. There's a bunch of introductory proof books, and you should frankly look on math.stackexchange.com. This question is a common one.

>>24625459
It's interesting, sometimes the proofs are a bit surprising, like an early one in book 1 that amounts to demonstrating that two triangles with equal sides and an equal angle will be equal as triangles by just moving one of them on top of the other and going, "...see?" Books 5 and 7 have a lot of overlap (they're both on ratios, but one treats magnitudes and the other treats numbers), and a lot of use in music theory and astronomy. The final book with all the Platonic solids is exhausting but really cool.

>>24625495
>music theory and astronomy
That's interesting because the reason I want to read Euclid is because I'm interested in the Trivium and the Quadrivium.

>>24625506
Well, it's a fine damn starter, though a very involved one. But the discussions of ratios in books 5 & 7 are relevant for the discovery of the tones of scales on a monochord (picture a guitar with no frets), for the work on conics by Apollonius, and for a good deal of the astronomy you would see in Ptolemy and all the way up to Galileo and Newton. Those two books by themselves might be the most important.

Boethius might be thought of as sort of a historical bridge.

>>24625521
Never said I'm just starting my studies of the Trivium and the Quadrivium.