De Sectione Rationis

1706

Shoults Eb 1706 A

[Oxford, Sheldonian Theatre]

Apollonius of Perga (ca. 262-190 BC) was born in modern-day Turkey and studied in Alexandria under the followers of Euclid. His work, Conics, contains 400 propositions and of the eight books that he wrote on the topic seven survive. Apollonius introduced the terms ellipse, parabola and hyperbola to the mathematical lexicon and his works, rediscovered and made popular in Renaissance Europe, influenced scholars like Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). On display is Apollonius’s other surviving work De Sectione Rationis, translated by the discoverer of Halley’s Comet, Edmund Halley (1656-1742), then Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford University, in 1706.