Apollonius - The Great Geometer and the Conic Sections: The Circle, Ellipse, Parabola and Hyperbola (The New Mathematics for the Millions Book 9)

Next to Archimedes, the most illustrious of the ancient Greek mathematicians was Apollonius of Perga who was born around 250 B.C. living and working about four decades after Archimedes.

Apollonius studied mathematics at the great University and Library in Alexandria under the successors of the great mathematical encyclopaedist Euclid.

Few of the treatise by Apollonius have directly survived the past two and a quarter millennia, and like so many of his contemporaries (like Eratosthenes and Aristarchus, to name a few), most of Apollonius’s work is known of directly by the Greek translations and indirectly through explicit mention in the mathematical writing of others like Pappus and his Mathematical Collections.

It is by his eight volume treatise On the Conic Sections, that Apollonius is best remembered – from which Apollonius became a renowned geometer and mathematician in the ancient world – The Great Geometer.

The term Conic Section gets it name from the fact that if you sliced through a cone, the edge or perimeter of the section that you would produce would be a circle, ellipse or hyperbola depending on the angle of the slice with respect to the longitudinal axis of the cone.

In this volume of the New Mathematics for the Millions, using algebra the four Conic Sections , the Circle, the Ellipse, the Parabola and the Hyperbola are studied.