EUCLID (Greek; flourished 300 BCE)
The Greek mathematician Euclid was called "the father of geometry." He lived in Alexandria, Egypt, under the Greek Ptolemaic rulers (the last of whom was Cleopatra) when that city was the center of learning for the western world. There he wrote the Elements, a book of mathematics (especially geometry) that was used into the 20th century. If you remember suffering through "proofs" in geometry derived from "givens," you can thank Euclid. Dry as it may sound, there is beauty in an elegant geometric proof: Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a sonnet in which she asserted, "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare."
- Euclid wrote at least five works besides the Elements. In addition to geometry, he wrote on the topics of perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory, and mathematical rigor.
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