Oliver Byrne
The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid
1847 · 306 pages
- Author
- Oliver Byrne
- Edition
- In which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners
- Published
- London, William Pickering, 1847
- Pages
- 306
- File
- DjVu, 5.7 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
Euclid’s Elements, written in Alexandria around 300 BC, was for more than two thousand years the standard textbook of geometry. In 1847 the Irish mathematician Oliver Byrne published the first six books, covering plane geometry, in a form nobody had tried before: instead of labelling points and lines with letters, he drew every figure in solid red, yellow and blue with black, and repeated those coloured shapes inside the text of each proof.
In his introduction Byrne argues that colours let a learner see at a glance which line or angle is meant, so that a proof can be followed with less effort and remembered longer. The book takes the reader through Euclid’s definitions, postulates and axioms and then proposition by proposition through triangles and parallels, the geometry of areas, circles, inscribed and circumscribed figures, the theory of proportion and similar figures, including the theorem of Pythagoras (Book I, Proposition XLVII).
Expensive to print, the book sold poorly in its day. It is now admired as one of the most striking books of the Victorian period, and its bold blocks of primary colour are often compared with twentieth-century abstract art and modern information design.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
The original 1847 edition, published in London by William Pickering, with the title page carrying Byrne’s coloured diagram of the Pythagorean theorem. The book is printed in red, yellow, blue and black, with large decorated initials and the long s in the text; it opens with a dedication to Earl Fitzwilliam, Byrne’s introduction, Euclid’s definitions, a page of symbols and abbreviations and a list of corrigenda. The scan is in colour and has a text layer, though the OCR reads the long s as an f and cannot render the coloured symbols.
How to read it
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.