The last great Platonist and Euclidean commentator of antiquity, Proclus (c. 410–485 ce), attributed to the inexhaustible Thales the discovery of the far-from-obvious proposition that even apparently obvious propositions need proof. Proclus referred especially to the theorem, known in the Middle Ages as the Bridge of Asses, that in an isosceles triangle the angles opposite the equal sides are equal. The theorem may have earned its nickname from the Euclidean figure or from the commonsense notion that only an ass would require proof of so obvious a statement. (See Sidebar: The Bridge of Asses.)

The ancient Greek geometers soon followed Thales over the Bridge of Asses. In the 5th century bce the philosopher-mathematician Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 bce) declared that his geometry excelled all the knowledge of the Egyptian rope pullers because he could prove what he claimed. By the time of Plato, geometers customarily proved their propositions. Their compulsion and the multiplication of theorems it produced fit perfectly with the endless questioning of Socrates and the uncompromising logic of Aristotle. Perhaps the origin, and certainly the exercise, of the peculiarly Greek method of mathematical proof should be sought in the same social setting that gave rise to the practice of philosophy—that is, the Greek polis. There citizens learned the skills of a governing class, and the wealthier among them enjoyed the leisure to engage their minds as they pleased, however useless the result, while slaves attended to the necessities of life. Greek society could support the transformation of geometry from a practical art to a deductive science. Despite its rigour, however, Greek geometry does not satisfy the demands of the modern systematist. Euclid himself sometimes appeals to inferences drawn from an intuitive grasp of concepts such as point and line or inside and outside, uses superposition, and so on. It took more than 2,000 years to purge the Elements of what pure deductivists deemed imperfections.

The Euclidean synthesis

Euclid, in keeping with the self-conscious logic of Aristotle, began the first of his 13 books of the Elements with sets of definitions (“a line is breadthless length”), common notions (“the whole is greater than the part”), and axioms, or postulates (“all right angles are equal”). Of this preliminary matter, the fifth and last postulate, which states a sufficient condition that two straight lines meet if sufficiently extended, has received by far the greatest attention. In effect it defines parallelism. Many later geometers tried to prove the fifth postulate using other parts of the Elements. Euclid saw farther, for coherent geometries (known as non-Euclidean geometries) can be produced by replacing the fifth postulate with other postulates that contradict Euclid’s choice.

The first six books contain most of what Euclid delivers about plane geometry. Book I presents many propositions doubtless discovered by his predecessors, from Thales’ equality of the angles opposite the equal sides of an isosceles triangle to the Pythagorean theorem, with which the book effectively ends. (See Sidebar: Euclid’s Windmill.)

Book VI applies the theory of proportion from Book V to similar figures and presents the geometrical solution to quadratic equations. As usual, some of it is older than Euclid. Books VII–X, which concern various sorts of numbers, especially primes, and various sorts of ratios, are seldom studied now, despite the importance of the masterful Book X, with its elaborate classification of incommensurable magnitudes, to the later development of Greek geometry. (See Sidebar: Incommensurables.)

Britannica Quiz

All About Math Quiz

Books XI–XIII deal with solids: XI contains theorems about the intersection of planes and of lines and planes and theorems about the volumes of parallelepipeds (solids with parallel parallelograms as opposite faces); XII applies the method of exhaustion introduced by Eudoxus to the volumes of solid figures, including the sphere; XIII, a three-dimensional analogue to Book IV, describes the Platonic solids. Among the jewels in Book XII is a proof of the recipe used by the Egyptians for the volume of a pyramid.

Gnomonics and the cone

During its daily course above the horizon the Sun appears to describe a circular arc. Supplying in his mind’s eye the missing portion of the daily circle, the Greek astronomer could imagine that his real eye was at the apex of a cone, the surface of which was defined by the Sun’s rays at different times of the day and the base of which was defined by the Sun’s apparent diurnal course. Our astronomer, using the pointer of a sundial, known as a gnomon, as his eye, would generate a second, shadow cone spreading downward. The intersection of this second cone with a horizontal surface, such as the face of a sundial, would give the trace of the Sun’s image (or shadow) during the day as a plane section of a cone. (The possible intersections of a plane with a cone, known as the conic sections, are the circle, ellipse, point, straight line, parabola, and hyperbola.)

However, the doxographers ascribe the discovery of conic sections to a student of Eudoxus’s, Menaechmus (mid-4th century bce), who used them to solve the problem of duplicating the cube. His restricted approach to conics—he worked with only right circular cones and made his sections at right angles to one of the straight lines composing their surfaces—was standard down to Archimedes’ era. Euclid adopted Menaechmus’s approach in his lost book on conics, and Archimedes followed suit. Doubtless, however, both knew that all the conics can be obtained from the same right cone by allowing the section at any angle.

The reason that Euclid’s treatise on conics perished is that Apollonius of Perga (c. 262–c. 190 bce) did to it what Euclid had done to the geometry of Plato’s time. Apollonius reproduced known results much more generally and discovered many new properties of the figures. He first proved that all conics are sections of any circular cone, right or oblique. Apollonius introduced the terms ellipse, hyperbola, and parabola for curves produced by intersecting a circular cone with a plane at an angle less than, greater than, and equal to, respectively, the opening angle of the cone.