A Short History of Greek Mathematics

Abstract

“THERE are three classes of persons who, being mathematical students, require to know something of the history of their pursuit. The first want only a general view of leading points, such as can be furnished by one writer in a few volumes. The second wish to be able to compare the accounts given by different persons, and, up to a certain point, to examine the authorities used by those persons, or at least to keep watch upon their mode of using them. The third are desirous of being the critics of the historians, and of amending their works, if need be.”1 The catalogue, which the writer of this paragraph drew up, was intended for the second of the above classes. In some further remarks he arranges the histories under two heads—those which are written on the plan of Montucla, Bossut (we may now add M. Marie's “Histoire des Sciences mathématiques et physiques”), in which a general account is framed out of the writer's notes or remembrances of miscellaneous reading; or in that of Delambre, Woodhouse (we may add here the name of Todhunter, whose great historical treatises the late Henry Smith pronounced to be “so suggestive of research, and so full of its spirit”), in which the successive writings of eminent men are examined and described one after the other, so that each chapter or section is a description of the progress of science in the hands of some one person, and is complete in itself. The latter, De Morgan goes on still further to say, is the plan which is most favourable to accuracy and most interesting to the inquirers of the third class; the former, while it better suits the first and second class, leaves the writer open to many sorts of error which the latter avoids.2