The Elements of Geometry.

EUCLID,.

Item Number: 140908

Dublin: Alexander M'Culloch, 1770.

Rare first printing of this edition of this landmark work. Octavo, bound in full contemporary calf. Edited by Joseph Fenn. In very good condition with the ownership signature of John P. Montgomery to the endpaper, also Robert M. Riddle, who was the mayor of Pittsburgh from 1853-54, small piece missing from the title page. Rare and desirable.

"Euclid's Elements of Geometry is the oldest mathematical textbook in the world still in common use today. Its author was a Greek mathematician living about 300 B.C. who founded a mathematical school in Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy I. The Elements is a compilation of all earlier Greek mathematical knowledge since Pythagoras, organized into a consistent system so that each theorem follows logically from its predecessor; and in this simplicity lies the secret of its success. Of the 13 books into which it is divided, numbers 1 to 4 are on plane geometry; 5 and 6 on the theory of proportion due to Eudoxus and its application; 7 to 9 on the properties of numbers; 10 on irrational quantities; 11 to 13 on solid geometry culminating in the proof that there are only five regular solids; books 14 and 15 were added later but are not by Euclid… The Elements remained the common school textbook of geometry for hundreds of years and about one thousand editions and translations have been published" (PMM 25). The editor Joseph Fenn ran a school in Dublin where he taught accounting, arithmetic and geometry and produced three books on the subjects between 1769 and 1772. In a 1795 letter to Thomas Jefferson from Anthony Gerna in Dublin, he writes, " I therefore take the liberty of addressing you these few lines, accompanied with a small bundle of Books, which will be presented to you by Mr. Isaac Weld, a young Gentleman, whose gentle manners, and other excellent qualities, may entitle him to your notice. The abovemention’d little bundle contains in particular, a Sett of Fenn’s Euclid and Arithmetic, of which I have sent 581 setts to America; and consigned to Messrs. James & Clibborn, merchants in Philadelphia in order to be disposed, at so low a price as to make it worth the attention of the public: And on such an Occasion, I humbly solicit your Countenance."