>>Thank you for joining me in the History of Science Collections of the University of
Oklahoma Libraries. Let's take a look at three treasures from the vault that throw light
on the story of Hellenistic mathematics. The Hellenistic period is the time between the
conquest of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. This is the period after
Alexander when the Mesopotamian accomplishments we explored earlier became widely known in
the Mediterranean world. During the Hellenistic period the intellectual center of activity
shifted from Athens to Alexandria, from Greece to Egypt. And being Greek referred not to
someone who lived in one of the little city-states but to a new world culture that spread as
a unifying force throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East.
Euclid was in Alexandria at the time of the first king in the Ptolemy line and allegedly
informed him that, "There is no royal road to Geometry." Yet, I wonder what Euclid would
say to this copy, the first English translation of Euclid, which contains all sorts of pedagogical
aids for schoolboys who knew no Latin. The Elizabethan mathematician and scholar of the
occult John Dee, contributed a preface advocating for popular mathematical education. When one
turns to Euclid's discussion of the geometrical solids, this copy still has the first pop-ups.
This is the first printed edition of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, published in Latin in
1482. The beautiful woodcuts are hand-colored in this copy. The texts of the first page
was printed in both black and red ink. The geometrical diagrams were quite difficult
to prepare. The printer, Erhard Ratdolt, moved south from Germany and set up shop in Venice.
To print the many curves and angles required, Ratdolt came up with the idea of forming the
diagrams with copper wire molded around jegs or forms. This innovation enabled Ratdolt
to print Euclid affordably, and to go on to print the first editions of many notable works
in astronomy and geometry.
This little book will represent how the power of mathematical methods, particularly of Euclidian
geometry, became evident in Hellenistic astronomy. Aristarchus of Samos, the Copernicus of antiquity,
proposed in the third century B.C.E. that the sun lies in the center of the universe
and that the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun. That work did not survive,
but in this book, Aristarchus showed how to calculate the sizes and distances of the Sun
and the Moon. From the second century forward, the sizes and distances of the Earth, Moon
and Sun were known. This is the first printed edition.
Hellenistic science represents the fusion of the cultures of the ancient Near East,
ancient Egypt, and early Greece. This cross-cultural fusion is illustrated, for example, in the
combination of the quantitative exact methods of Babylonian astronomy and the qualitative
geometrical methods of Greek mathematicians and astronomers. Science is a story. What
stories do you want to hear and tell about Hellenistic mathematics?