商品簡介
Although not so well known today, Book 4 of Pappus' Collection is one of the most important and influential mathematical texts from antiquity, both because of its content and because of its impact on early modern mathematics after 1600. As a kind of textbook in anthology format, the mathematical vignettes form a portrait of mathematics during the Hellenistic "Golden Age", illustrating central problems-for example, it discusses all three of the famous ancient problems in geometry: squaring the circle; doubling the cube; and trisecting an angle-varying solution strategies, and the different mathematical styles within ancient geometry.
Historians of mathematics will find it useful for scholarly work on ancient geometry and its reception in the early modern era and it will also serve as a source book for exemplary arguments in ancient geometry. Pappus himself probably intended Collection 4 to be an introductory survey of the classical geometrical tradition-from the point of view of mathematical methods and strategies-for readers that had a basic training in elementary geometry (Elements I-VI). Likewise, this edition can be used as a textbook in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of ancient geometry.
