UREM-ULB :
Unité de Recherche sur l’Enseignement des Mathématiques

« One of the oldest extant diagrams from Euclid

One of the oldest and most complete diagrams from Euclid’s Elements of Geometry is a fragment of papyrus found among the remarkable rubbish piles of Oxyrhynchus in 1896-97 by the renowned expedition of B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt. It is now located at the University of Pennsylvania. The diagram accompanies Proposition 5 of Book II of the Elements, and along with other results in Book II it can be interpreted in modern terms as a geometric formulation of an algebraic identity - in this case, that ab + (a-b)2/4 = (a+b)2/4 (although the relationship between Euclid’s propositions and algebra, which he did not possess, is controversial). »

ᔥ : http://www.math.ubc.ca/ cass/Euclid/papyrus/

↬ : John Baez sur Google+