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An interactive version of Byrne's The Elements of Euclid (1847)
- kqr 9mo agoThe reprint of the Byrne edition of Euclid is the most beautiful book I have, and I have more shelf-metres of books than I have fingers and toes. It will always have a prominent place in my home. This website day have been what got me into it -- I don't remember. It's also fun to try to replicate the proofs!
- srean 9mo agoIndeed. It's such a beautiful book. I love Playfair's too. I used to have a lot of trouble with Euclid's (translated) definition of a straight line, ... What the heck is "lies evenly". Playfair's made it click. Another point is those Euclidean definitions aren't really formal definitions, but familiarisations. Then it makes more sense. After Playfairs my understanding of an Euclidean straight line is that it's a function from a pair of points to a set of points (that forms the line) such that if you invoke the same function on any pair of points in its range you get back the same exact set of points (the range of the function). This made it click why a "straight line" in hyperbolic geometry or spherical geometry is still a "straight line". On a different note, David Berlinski's Tour of Calculus is possibly the most atrocious, verbal diarrheaic book I have ever read. The formula of the book seems to be that every confusing sentence can be righted if every noun is accompanied by 20 florid adjectives and verbs by 59 muddled adverbs and no one will notice that the sentence is nonsense. For some reason it gets a lot of love among some HN readers. Very few books generate as much revulsion in me than that one.
- qurashee 9mo agoAre you referring to the kroneckerwallis one ?
- helterskelter 9mo agoWhich edition do you have, as in, who published it?
- kqr 8mo agoThe box by Taschen.
- initself 9mo agoSt. John's College FTW!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- westurner 9mo agoEuclid's Elements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_Elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_Elements Oliver Byrne (mathematician) > Byrne's Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)#Byrness_Euclid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)#B...
- amadeuspagel 9mo agoBeautiful, and would be so much more beautiful if it used a modern font, without these weird cs and fs. I actually had to copy-paste "reproduction" to convince myself that this is a c character, and I'm not reading something in some ancient version of english with characters that I've never seen.
- kqr 9mo agoYou get used to it very quickly. If you're actually interested, give it five minutes and you'll read it like normal. If you're not interested, the long s and the ligatures are not the problem.
- falcor84 9mo agoI am interested, it's been more than five minutes and it is a problem. Accessibility is not a PEBCAK issue.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago> in some ancient version of english with characters that I've never seen There are really only 3, or if you want to stretch it 5, English characters that you might not be familiar with as characters: þ, ƿ, ð, æ, and ȝ. And the last of those isn't even present in Old English; it's a Middle English thing. If you were reading something in Old English, the use of ƿ wouldn't really be an issue - the issue would be that nothing made any sense. Recognizing the characters used, or not, is irrelevant. As you note, the recognition issue is an issue of fonts and not of alphabets. Compare wikipedia's sample of blackletter: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calligraphy.malmesbury.bible.arp.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calligraphy.malmesbu...
- ivansavz 9mo agoThere is a menu from the top bar to change the "Modern English."
- amadeuspagel 9mo agoThanks. So this has modern "s" characters, rather then characters that look like an "f" with the horizontal bar missing, which is an improvement. Still, when an "s" or "c" is followed by a "t", there's this ligature connecting it. This kind of makes sense - the sounds are different after all - but it took me a while to figure out.
- tartoran 9mo agoWhats up with the typos? Is it the fonts? I have no problem reading it but i wanted my kid to read it
- seanhunter 9mo agoThere is a button at the top right that says “old English “. Set it to “modern English “. By default it’s trying to faithfully reproduce the original.
- saalweachter 9mo agoThey call it "old English"? That's disappointing.
- ghtbircshotbe 9mo agoAre there any interactive elements to this? It looks like a noninteractive presentation of the book as a webpage.
- ridgeguy 9mo agoScroll down a bit. Interactive elements were below "Definitions" on the page I tried.
- jstanley 9mo agoI don't see the "Definitions" heading.
- carefulfungi 9mo agoIf you click on the elements in the proposition text, it highlights those elements in the sidebar constructions.
- aap_ 9mo agoThis is looking really beautiful! For a long time I've wanted to have a nice edition of the elements in the original greek. There are some pdfs around but they look rather uninspired. Something like Byrne's edition in greek would be so lovely! Though this is not a straight translation but quite reworked to make it more graphical, so probably wouldn't work too well with the original text without some work anyway.