How smart do you have to be to read/understand Euclid's Elements?

you have to finish multivariable calculus by the end of highschool before you even think of reading that

I liked that part in the movie Lincoln where Lincoln's waiting for a telegram chatting with an engineer, and cites Euclid's Elements, realizing that Hamiilton was quoting from him when they used the line "We hold these truths to be self evident..."

>>8537914
>how smart do i have to be to understand dumb dumb maths from 2000 yeras ago because the people 2000 years ago must be sooo much smarter than us in {Current_Year}

>>8537914
If you get a compass and straight edge and draw all the proofs as you go then it's pretty much impossible not to get.

you have to be a retard in order to read the book. no one worth a damn wastes his time on such outdated books

>>8538099
There are modernized versions of that book though. I have one that was written with intention of preparing middle schoolers for math Olympics, which was basically a book on proofs. It shared with Elements the approach of proving your way up from axioms, basic theorems to all the other theorems in geometry. I agree that reading the original Elements is pointless, but reading its modernized versions or books heavily inspired by it is not.

File: 2010457.png (329KB, 555x555px) Image search: [Google]

329KB, 555x555px

This paper introduces Tarski's system of axioms for synthetic (i.e., non-coordinate) geometry:

http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/notemat/article/viewFile/13743/12124

Apparently this system subsumes Hilbert's:

http://www.michaelbeeson.com/research/papers/TarskiProvesHilbert.pdf

But very little else seems to have been written on synthetic geometry.

Is it a dead field, or are there simply things out there that I've missed?

>>8538099

>he thinks that the Elements are outdated

more ahistoricity and failure of understanding from /sci/.

The irony of your post is that your claim would have been valid if you had been talking about just about any other areas of the sciences apart from math

But I know now by your own admission that you're nineteen years old, plus or minus a year. Or if not then your education is at that level.