Abstract
Historians point out that, while in economics Gresham's Law holds (“bad currency drives out good currency”), in mathematics a kind of reverse law holds: Good books drive out bad or inferior books. Thus, historians can offer evidence that Euclid's Elements drove out of circulation the geometry texts of his predecessors, and, in a less well-known instance, they can show that Ptolemy's Almagest made the trigonometric writings of Archimedes, Hipparchus, and perhaps others disappear. And in Ptolemy, just as in the case of Euclid, there are some beautiful gems of mathematical literature available —even if his system of astronomy has been superseded.
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