Hippocrates himself is an example of the concurrent study of the two departments. On the one hand, he was the first of the Greeks who is known to hav… - Thomas Little Heath

" "

Hippocrates himself is an example of the concurrent study of the two departments. On the one hand, he was the first of the Greeks who is known to have compiled a book of Elements. This book, we may be sure, contained in particular the most important propositions about the circle included in Euclid, Book III. But a much more important proposition is attributed to Hippocrates; he is said to have been the first to prove that circles are to one another as the squares on their diameters (= Eucl. XII., 2) with the deduction that similar segments of circles are to one another as the squares on their bases. These propositions were used by him in his tract on the squaring of lunes, which was intended to lead up to the squaring of the circle. The latter problem is one which must have exercised practical geometers from time immemorial. Anaxagoras for instance is said to have worked at the problem while in prison.

English
Collect this quote

About Thomas Little Heath

Sir Thomas Little Heath (5 October 1861 – 16 March 1940) was a British civil servant, mathematician, classical scholar, historian of ancient Greek mathematics, translator, and mountaineer. Heath translated works of Euclid of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga, Aristarchus of Samos, and Archimedes of Syracuse into English.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Thomas Heath (classicist) Thomas L. Heath Sir Thomas Little Heath

Share this quote as an image

Customize card

Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Thomas Little Heath

Aristotle would... by no means admit that mathematics was divorced from aesthetic; he could conceive, he said, of nothing more beautiful than the objects of mathematics.

Eudoxus was perhaps the greatest of all Archimedes's predecessors, and it is his achievements, especially the discovery of the method of exhaustion, which interest us in connexion with Archimedes.

Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI

Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.

Hippocrates also attacked the problem of doubling the cube. ...Hippocrates did not, indeed, solve the problem, but he succeeded in reducing it to another, namely, the problem of finding two mean proportionals in continued proportion between two given straight lines, i.e. finding x, y such that a:x=x:y=y:b, where a, b are the two given straight lines. It is easy to see that, if a:x=x:y=y:b, then b/a = (x/a)<sup>3</sup>, and, as a particular case, if b=2a, x<sup>3</sup>=2a<sup>3</sup>, so that the side of the cube which is double of the cube of side a is found.

Loading...