Subject: Re: [HM] "President Garfield's Proof"
From: Larry Davidson (ljd@world.com)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 20:46:01 EST
On 2/29/00 6:53 PM, Avinoam Mann at MANN@vms.huji.ac.il wrote:
>
> Recently I've visited a maths department whose walls were decorated,
> among other things, with posters of various proofs of the Pythagorean
> Theorem. One of these posters was titled 'Oliver Byrne's proof'. That
> proof was very familiar: it was Euclid's original proof. Those members of
> the department that I asked did not know how 'Oliver Byrne' has become a
> pseudonym of Euclid. Maybe one of the readers of this list know?
Oliver Byrne is not a pseudonym of Euclid. Byrne's contribution wasn't the
structure of this proof--which was openly Euclid's--but the use of color and
other features of his diagrams to replace a lot of the text. In 1847 Byrne
published his own version of Euclid's Elements (the first six books only),
using pictures to substitute for text wherever possible. Pretty remarkable
for 1847, considering that we're struggling with these kinds of pedagogical
issues today! You can find the complete info at
http://sunsite.ubc.ca/DigitalMathArchive/Euclid/byrne.html ,
the first of a fascinating series of webpages. (I have no connection with
this site. I am merely an admirer of it.)
Larry Davidson
Mathematics Dept.
Weston High School
Weston, MA
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