Reasoning: Reading Euclid

When I was at the Indo-Eurpean Studies conference, I talked to a PhD candidate from Berkeley about new translations of the Ancient Greek mathematicians. We discussed how difficult it is to translate the old mathematicians because they did not have the technical vocabulary now available, but they show some remarkable things in their writings. Since I toyed for a while writing my thesis on one of the Greek mathematicians, I was quite excited about this topic. According to the person I spoke with, however, a lot of the translations are extremely problematic.

On the other hand, reading ancient math is still fascinating. In my number theory class, we read a number of Euclid's proofs [1]. Now, Reading Odyssey, the group that puts on Marathon 2500, is doing a Euclid group. It's free if you have never joined a Reading Odyssey project before. I have been toying with the idea of joining...

I will be posting about the conference and Horace poems in the next few days.

Endnotes

1. We read one of the proofs on talk-like-a-pirate-day and Cerinthus' sister read it in a pirate voice. It was hilarious. This is the same class in which the pineapple incident took place.