Sources
Euclid's Elements
Euclid
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Euclid's own book, composed in Alexandria around 300 BCE during the reign of the first Ptolemy, organizing the whole of ancient geometry and much of ancient number theory into thirteen books built from five postulates and a small set of common notions through explicit, checkable proof. Books one through six cover plane geometry, books seven through nine number theory including the Euclidean algorithm, book ten irrational numbers, and books eleven through thirteen three-dimensional geometry and the five regular polyhedra. More than one thousand editions have been published since its first printing in 1482, and it is widely held to be among the most translated, published and studied books in the Western world.
Facts
AuthorEuclid
Source TypeBook (primary)
Reliability Tier1
Primary source: Euclid's own foundational compilation of geometric and number-theoretic proof, tier 1 for what the Elements itself contains. No publication-year fact is recorded: the work was copied by hand for over a millennium before its first printing in 1482, and no precise year or original publisher exists for its actual composition, so this file records the approximate era, circa 300 BCE per MacTutor's own account, in the description rather than invent a false-precision year fact. Sources
Claims Backed By This Source (4 claims)
This source backs 4 claims across the atlas. As facts: 4 well-attested.
Disposition By Topic
- Sources, 4 claims: 4 well-attested.
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