News Notes

Abstract

Sir Thomas Heath, who published his History of Greek Mathematics nine years ago, is now publishing with the Oxford University Press A Manual of Greek Mathematics. His idea in this book has been to give the general reader who has not lost interest in the studies of his youth and who would wish to know how it came about that a Greek by the name of Euclid wrote a textbook which, in an almost literal translation, was used in schools and in the universities in this country as the recognized basis of instruction in elementary geometry. He tells of Euclid's forerunners and of their respective contributions; and of Euclid's successor, Archimedes, who anticipated the integral calculus and who by arithmetic combined with geometry measured the circle and who laid the mathematical foundations of statics and created the whole science of hydrostatics.