Saw the chemistry thread and saw some good recommendations, but

I feel like you think Plato wrote about geometry, but he didn't. What he was interested in was the proofs. You could get a similar experience from symbolic logic if you don't want to do mathematics. Otherwise any rigorous mathematics would be fine. Back in plato's day the only rigorous mathematics was Euclid's elements (as far as I know), and that was geometry.

Euclid's Elements has held up surprisingly well over the millennia.

>>9664263
>Euclid's elements
see yeah i wanted to know if /lit/ knew of other books, i saw this book and supposedly the first volume is plato's work. And yeah plato is the earliest guy i knew to write about geometry.

But if plato wasn't the first to write about geometry then who did? Earlier civilizations?

>>9664276
Thanks man, im probably going to start there. If nothing else then ill do some research on some college geometry text books with some online lectures.

Maybe im just interested in the history instead of the actual geometry itself. who knows.

>Some old ancient Greek texts (plato) would be nice
The Timaeus might float your boat. Euclid's Elements is still good today, even if there are things that he doesn't do that are later done by folks like Descartes and those people who came up with other geometries in the past few hundred years.

>>9664277
Geometry was originally the measurement of the earth, useful for the construction of things like pyramids and grain silos. Egypt, Babylon, the list goes on.
>supposedly the first volume is plato's work
I've never heard this before and I don't see why it matters.

>>9664244
Kiselev I & II, Coxeter, then Euclid with Hartshorne (sp?)

>>9664244
>chemistry thread

Link?

>>9664277
>But if plato wasn't the first to write about geometry then who did? Earlier civilizations?

The Chinese also independently discovered Pythagoras theorem, and they also independently founded matrix theory and Gauss elimination, both of which are used in modern geometry.

Ancient geometry isn't all that interesting from a purely maths point of view, when it got interesting was the 17th century through the 19th century with the addition of modern algebra(Euler), calculus(Leibniz), solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, linear algebra, etc etc.

>>9664277
All fundamental disciplines were founded by Hermes Trismegistus

>>9667370
This includes spaceflight.

>>9667370
back to /x/ with you tinfoilian.

File: GMTH.jpg (27KB, 432x432px) Image search: [Google]

27KB, 432x432px

>>9664244
I have a copy of Sir Thomas Heath's, "A History of Greek Mathematics," in two volumes.

Would recommend.

Here's a pdf link to the first volume for you.

>http://www.wilbourhall.org/pdfs/heath/HeathVolI.pdf