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Euclid's Elements

In Our Time: Science

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Euclid: The Second Most Popular Book After the Bible

Melvin: I would have liked to have expanded a little more on editions of Euclid, beyond Billingsley and the whole... There's some popular editions. The discovery of those non-Euclidean geometries was a little bit of a crisis because it made people think, oh, have we actually proved that this is not gonna lead to contradiction somehow? That led to Russell and Whitehead trying to sort of, in a way, redo Euclid. And also we didn't spend long enough on this idea of algebra, because that's really fascinating that actually Euclid proves that thing about prime numbers. But he has no lines. You take three lines which are inc

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