2017-10-24

gfish: (Default)
2017-10-24 12:22 pm

Book stuff: Euclid's Elements

So, I find myself writing a book, almost by accident. I started writing and found it a lot easier than I expected. I've kept at it for 34K words now. It pulls together a lot of my thoughts on the history/philosophy of math/science, some of which I first shared here. As part of the research for this, I just finished reading through Euclid's Elements. This turned out to be both easier and more pleasant than I would have guessed. It was good to get a refresher in basic geometry, if nothing else. There are a lot of identities that, if I even ever learned them in middle school, I had long since forgotten. That will always be useful in the shop, not to mention the old school science texts I've been reading which rely heavily on geometric proofs. One of the major themes of the book is how different modern, algebraic thinking is from classical modes of geometric proofs.

An excerpt from what I've been writing )

And some more later on )