Euclid's legacy. A ramble through geometry and its history (Q2844484)

This is a survey of some interesting topics in geometry -- that ought to be known by the educated reader -- in their historical context. It aims to bridge the gap between the world of Greek history and philology and that of mathematics, to be both an introduction to the basics of geometry and to its -- largely Greek -- history. In this it succeeds admirably, keeping the mathematical requirements for its understanding at an absolute minimum. It starts with the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes, proved by means of the anthyphairesis of the side and diagonal of squares and regular pentagons, devotes a whole chapter to various proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, presents the Platonic solids, Archimedes with his achievements in the domain of spheres and cylinders, but also subjects that belong to the applications of geometry, such as Eratosthenes and his computation of the circumference of the Earth, cartography in the sense of Archimedes and Lambert, and rudiments of the history of planetary astronomy. Other topics include cyclic quadrilaterals, ratios, four of the classical Greek construction problems (the constructibility with ruler and compass of regular \(n\)-gons, the Delian problem, the trisection of a given angle, the squaring of the circle, with a rather in-depth discussion of the quadratrix and the Archimedean spiral as construction instruments), conic sections (in greater detail than one would expect, with both Apollonian theorems and more modern ones presented and proved in the company of exquisitely drawn figures). The book ends with a very short introduction to the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries.