The Thirteen Books of the Elements, Vol. 2: Books 3-9

We, the children of this new age, are deprived of major classics and beautiful mathematics because of the tediousness of the notation. Oh, do not be optimistic, this is not the only book with forbidding notation, see Artin's Galois theory, which is an excellent book if someone just tries to update its notation.Aside from that the book was a merry one. It contains more books than the first one. It contains the books 3 up to 9 of Euclid's 13 books of the elements.Book 3 is a delightful one. Its sole purpose is to characterize circles. It goes with the same style of the first two books given the first volume. Books 4 continues in the same fashion and studies circumscribing and inscribing figures by others.Book 5 is the first attempt to bring geometry near to algebra. It deals with proportions. The notation started getting more and more cumbersome. He continues giving us things that we know already. And all through the volume until book 9 we see results commonly given in simple college algebra in the most tedious fashion.I praise this volume only for the material on circles and I see that it is worth reading if you have a strong constitution. As for me I am not going to read the third one about the out of date commensurable numbers.

This is a great edition of the Elements, with an exhaustive (if now dated in places) commentary. As a work of scholarship, it deserves 5 stars and more. The Kindle edition, however, is a mess, with two principal problems:1) The editor (or, more likely, automatic formatter) has put in links from every mention of a proposition or page reference. This is very useful. But page references to *other* books are also linked as though they were pages in this volume; not so useful.2) The big problem: the Greek is a *mess*. A jumble of typefaces, scanned letters and mathematical symbols (!) used to put together the Greek words and phrases that appear on just about every page of this text. I see hardly a single word in which the accentuation and breathing has been placed correctly. And on some pages, I see the same word appearing 4 different ways, depending on how the scanner picked it up! (pi turned into tt, accents flipped back and forth, acute accents turned into rough breathings in the middle of the page, letters simply misidentified in other ways). Much of the very learned commentary in this book is a careful analysis of single Greek words or phrases; it is an insult both to the original scholarship and to the users of the book to mess this up so badly.I love Dover books. But they need to get a *human being* to got through the 3 volumes of this work (and all 3 volumes are just as bad as each other), and correct these errors, particularly the Greek. As it is, I would recommend anyone interested in the book to buy the print edition, but avoid the Kindle version at all costs,

Suggest that you read reviews for volumes 1 and 3. Unless you have a true academic interest in Euclid and the Elements, this three volume set is overkill and I'd guess the average buyer who has not had a chance to read a few pages before buying will put it down after 50 to 100 pages. I personally was looking for a review discussion of the theorems and postulates. These three volumes go into exhausting detail and history that was/is far beyond what I wanted. They are well done and I continue to labor through, 20 pages at a time. if your friends haven't read them, they will be impressed to see them on your shelf and they do move quickly (and repeatedly) at annual library book sales.

Now if you permit me to say that Euclid's ideas from so long ago are still being used in the understanding of how subatomic (elementary) particles work together to form the matter we see around us. This volume and Volume 3 are part of that elementary understanding of how muons and prions and other elementary particles work to make the world we live in. One has to love how things work in space. Not bad for an old philosopher with brilliant ideas.

This was the book that got me into mathematics. After years of being afraid of the subject, I did a little digging and decided to start here, at the very beginning. I was hooked. I went through the books, proof by proof, constantly being amazed at what I was learning, and how easy it was for me to comprehend. From these books I was able to springboard into many other areas of mathematics, but I owe it all to Euclid. T.L. Heath's translation is quite perfect, and his explanations of the proofs and the historical background he provides make him the absolute authority on the subject. This is the best translation out there, hands down.

I bought this book for a geometry class, but after I started reading it I ended up reading more than was assigned. Fun way to learn about euclidean geometry if you have the knowledge to understand the book

The essence of ALL fundamental reasoning distilled into three very affordable and faithful translations...I would think giving it five stars would be an understatement, but that's as much as I can do! Definitely a must for, well, everyone.

One of the truly great books of the West. Every math student should study it. Every math professor should promote and use it. Alas, few even know of it.

Arrived on time, and is as advertised.an added bonus in this addition is the inclusion of the original 'literal' translation, as will as a more modern version.

OK

Classic

Very interesting, explains the maths from the very first people who were learning and discovering the subject from first principles

The media could not be loaded.  The printing on most pages are very fine, not recommended for people with glasses and/or over 40. There are 2 pre-requisites - unless you are a great mathematician, it is best to read-up "What is Mathematics?" by Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins (revised by Ian Stewart) and, secondly coloured diagrams (in place of simple black and white) would make EUCLID elements simpler to understand.