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Euclid's Elements Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: A superior edition
Comment: I have attempted the elements before but found myself caught in the voluminous commentary by its translator, Heath. This edition pares all that down into a crisp, readable text. The editors should be commended for their excellent decisions regarding typeface, reproducing the illustrations to coincide with the proofs and an overall wonderful exposition of Euclid's work. If you want to actually read Euclid as opposed to Heath, this is the book for you.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Euclid's Elements
Comment: This book, a translation from Greek, is one of the most printed and used books
with the exception of the Bible being greater in both actions. After Gutenberg
processed his bibles and a few other works - he printed Elements for the craftsmen
of Europe. Those builders of Churches and massive buildings.
This is a fine translation and all 13 books of Elements are contained within.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, but I prefer the recent Fitzpatrick edition ...
Comment: No doubt this is a precious edition, but the recent one by Richard Fitzpatrick in Greek and English is really astounding (and affordable), especially the version in 4 volumes, where a full page (and more than one if needed) is generously given to each proposition.

OTH I find the classical Heath/Dover edition an essential reference, precisely for the illuminating Heath's interspersed commentary. In fact Heath's "A History of Greek Mathematics" and the shorter "A Manual of Greek Mathematics" are just as essential to a better understanding of Euclid, and of course Greek Mathematics.

As a complementary/companion reading I would heartily recommend Benno Artmann's excellent "Euclid - The Creation of Mathematics", priceless, if only, for its bibliography.

An indispensable and brilliant mathematical "guided reading" based on the development of Greek Mathematics, fundamental for an overall understanding of the Elements, is B. L. van der Waerden's "Science Awakening" (1954, out of print, but still possible to find).

A philological approach, incredibly rich in its revelations about the Elements and early Greek Mathematics in general is Arpad Szabo's "The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics" (very expensive!, but worth every penny).

An then there's David Fowler's "The Mathematics of Plato's Academy", an up-to-date comprehensive account on Greek Mathematics of the time, and Euclid of course.

Just a final, more general comment. Through its many layers Euclid's Elements is a key to the better understanding of our deepest roots. I myself discovered it late in my life and cannot believe what I missed. I now understand that the fundamentals of Ancient Greece - and consequently ours - cannot be fully grasped without this book. It would be no exaggeration to affirm that Plato and Aristotle are not fully intelligible without Euclid and that, in general, without knowledge of the Elements Ancient Greece would be just a "shadow of the past", devoid of the sparkling light cast by its mathematics and science.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A beautiful and functional rendering of one of the all-time greats.
Comment: This edition of the Elements is not a new translation -- it's Heath's classic translation that has stood as the authoritative English version for almost a century. Rather, it's a repackaging of Euclid so that all the books are in a single volume (unlike the Dover edition) and with some marked improvements in typesetting and binding. Unlike most repackaging efforts, which provide little to no value added to the work, the folks at Green Lion Press have made simple changes that provide great improvement.

First, the front matter of the book is extremely helpful for first-time readers. There are detailed descriptions of the idioms used by Euclid in his proofs, especially some of the more esoteric terms such as "same ratio" (which Euclid uses but never really clarifies). The explanations draw upon classical and contemporary scholarship in Greek mathematics, and they elucidate the text greatly.

Second, the binding is outstanding and sure to stand up to robust reading and annotating (which is what books are for, right?). The paper is not glued to the binding, so you can open it flat without tearing the pages from the spine. I found it a little hard to open the book flat due to the sheer size of it, especially in the first few pages. But that's why God made paperweights.

Third, the figures in the text -- which are obviously crucial to any text on geometry -- are reproduced whenever they are referred to, to minimize having to flip back and forth to view the same diagram and thus saving wear and tear on the book. Again, this is not high-tech here, just a simple change that makes the book a lot more usable.

I am reading through this book right now and it's like being a kid in a toy shop. I'm looking forward greatly to sharing the book with my geometry students next year. I think any person studying geometry or just interested in digesting some of the greatest intellectual works of all time, as this book is, would do well to reinvest and purchase this volume.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: nice edition of a beautiful classic
Comment: Euclid's Elements is a beautiful classic, and anyone with a serious interest in mathematics should look at it at some point.

This is a nice edition: the paper and binding are high quality, and diagrams are repeated if necessary so that you never have to flip pages between a diagram and the argument that is referring to it.

There is no commentary except for a brief introduction (some of which consists of quotes from older commentaries). Many readers may find this preferable to the Heath edition, where Euclid is almost drowned out by overwhelming amounts of commentary.

If you haven't read Euclid before, you might be surprised to find that the proofs are full of gaps. Many proofs use arguments which are not justified by the axioms (for example the proof of the first proposition takes it for granted that a certain pair of circles intersect), and there are many examples of "proof by special case". These issues don't really detract from the beauty of the work (and one can argue that putting everything on an absolutely rigorous foundation wasn't the original goal anyway), but are probably part of the reason why this book has been so heavily commented over the millennia. For a modern discussion of the mathematical issues in Euclid, and some related subsequent developments, I recommend "Geometry: Euclid and Beyond" by Hartshorne.

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