Des « mathématiques vulgaires » à la « monade hiéroglyphique » : Les Éléments d'Euclide vus par John Dee / From « common mathematics » to the « hieroglyphic monad » : John Dee's view of the Elements of Euclid

Abstract

SUMMARY. — John Dee (1527-1608) worked a lot on Euclid. In 1550, he commented the first two books of the Elements ; in 1563, he communicated to his friend Federico Commandino Mohammed al-Bagdadi's De superficierum divisionibus, which he identified as being a lost book of Euclid; in 1569, he wrote the preface to the first English translation of the Elements (London, 1570), making some philological emendations on Euclid's text and adding various commentaries and « inventions » of his own to the books X-XIII. But Dee also devoted himself to an esoteric research concerning mathematics : in his Monas hieroglyphica (1564), he interpreted Euclidean geometry in an original way ; an example is here given, in which Proclus and Lucretius are used to compose a very strange « mechanical magic ».