FIRST EDITION
of Books 1-4 of Apollonius of
Perga’s Conics, “one of the greatest scientific
books of antiquity” (Sarton), dating from the
early 2nd century B.C., the original Greek
text of which did not appear until 1710.
Books 5-7, surviving only in Arabic, were first
published in Latin translation in 1661. “In
astronomy, Ptolemy used Apollonius as his
authority on epicycles and eccentrics to account
for the apparent motions of the planets . . . In
mathematics, Apollonius’s Conics give us the
concepts and nomenclature for ellipse, parabola,
and hyperbola . . . Apollonius found a new
generalized way to describe the properties of all
three conic sections, and went on to discuss a
number problems connected with them. The
Conics . . . were studied by Arab astronomers
and by Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes,
Edmund Halley, and Isaac Newton”—BEA,
pages 51-52. DSB I, 179-93; Hoffmann I,
205; Sarton I, 173-75.
FIRST EDITION IN THE ORIGINAL GREEK
of
works by Archimedes (287-212 B.C.) on
measurement of the circle, spirals, quadrature of
the parabola, conoids and spheroids, and the
possibility of numbering the sands, with the
addition of the 6th-century commentary by
Eutocius of Ascalon. “Archimedes—together
with Newton and Gauss—is generally
regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians
the world has ever known . . . His influence
began to take full effect only after the publica-
tion of this first printed edition, which enabled
Descartes, Galileo, and Newton in particular to
build on what he had begun” (PMM). Adams
A1531; BEA, pages 56-57; DSB I, 213-31;
Hoffmann I, 228; Norman 64; Printing and
the Mind of Man 72; Sarton I, 169-72.
