Euclid of Alexandria

Euclid - books was consider as the one of most published book on earth.  Element, name of Euclid's book, was hand-copied by scribes for nearly 2000 years. Since the coming of printing press, over 1.000 edition have been printed, the first in 1482. Element consist of 13 books, or units. Although most people associate Euclid with Geometry, Element also contains number theory and elementary algebra, all the mathematics known to the scholars of the day.

Euclid's monumental contribution to the world of mathematics was his method of organization, not his discovery of new theorems. He took all the mathematical knowledge that had been compiled since the days of Thales and organized it in such a way that every result followed logically from its predecessors. To begin this chain of proof, Euclid had to start with a handful of assumption, or a thing that cannot be proved. These assumptions are called axioms, or postulate, are accepted without proof. By carefully choosing five geometric postulates, Euclid proceeded to prove 465 result, many of which were quite complicated and not at all intuitively obvious. The beauty of his work is that so much was proved from so few assumption.



The postulates:

1. A straight line segment can be drawn from any point to any other point.
2. A (finite) straight line segment can be extended continuously into an (infinite) straight line.
3. A circle may be describe with any center and any radius.
4. All right angles are equal to one another.
5. Given a line and a point not on the line, there is one and only one line through the point of parallel to the original line.

The only 'controversial' item on this line is postulate #5, the so-called parallel postulate. This proved to be the unraveling of Euclidean Geometry, and later (2000 yrs) non-Euclidean were born.

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wiki : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclides