Euclid's Elements of Geometry, Plane and Solid

tic was as great as Archimedes, Apollonius, and Euclid were in Geometry; truly a master of all numerical subtlety; from whom was discovered that admirable art which we call Algebra; which in these times has been rendered much more perfect and universal by François Viète and René Descartes. Among the ancients, Nicomachus is celebrated, renowned for his monuments on Arithmetic, Geometry, and Music; Serenus for his two books on the section of the cylinder [and cone], most well-known to geometers; [and] Proclus, Pappus, and Theon. How great a mathematician Proclus was is manifest from his most learned commentaries on Euclid and other writings. And this, I suppose, is he who, as Zonaras reports, and from him Ramus and Baronius, in the year of Christ 514, burned the fleet of Vitalianus besieging Constantinople by means of an optical artifice of mirrors*. The truly great praises of Theon are wonderfully exaggerated by Peter Ramus, such that he even thinks the books which all have hitherto ascribed to Euclid ought to be attributed to Theon. But Ramus is everywhere too unfair to Euclid; and resting on no solid foundation, he is not to be heard here. That there may at last be an end, let Pappus close the procession, being chronologically almost the last among the ancients, as he lived around the year 400, but in the fame of his name and in all praise of mathematics, he is to be counted among the first. Alexandria, the fertile parent of talents, which had brought forth before Hypsicles, Ctesibius, and Diophantus, gave this man also to the great good of Mathematics. He wrote seven books of Mathematical collections

* Tacquet incorrectly confuses two men of the same name. For Proclus Lycius, famous for many writings in Philosophy and Mathematics, died in the year of Christ 485, and is therefore distinct from that Proclus who, under the Emperor Anastasius, burned the fleet of Vitalianus.