Overview: The seventh book of Pappus‘s Collection, his commentary on the Domain (or Treasury) of Analysis, figures prominently in the history of both ancient and modern mathematics: as our chief source of information concerning several lost works of the Greek geometers Euclid and Apollonius, and as a book that inspired later mathematicians, among them Viete, Newton, and Chasles, to original discoveries in their pursuit of the lost science of antiquity. This presentation of it is concerned solely with recovering what can be learned from Pappus about Greek mathematics. The main part of it compri
|