|Ancient Greek index||History Topics Index| There are two
separate articles in this archive: "How do we know about Greek
mathematics?" and How do we know about Greek mathematicians?.
There is a common belief that the question posed in this
article, about Greek mathematics rather than Greek
mathematicians, is easy to answer. Perhaps all we need to do to
answer it is to read the mathematical treatises which the Greek
mathematicians wrote. We might think, very naively, that
although some of the origainal texts have been lost there should
be plenty left for us to be able to gain an excellent picture of
Greek mathematics. The truth, however, is not nearly so simple
and we will illustrate the way that Greek mathematical texts
have come down to us by looking first at perhaps the most famous
example, namely Euclid's Elements. When we read Heath's The
Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements are we reading an English
translation of the words which Euclid wrote in 300 BC? In order
to answer this question we need to examine