The First 6 Books of the Elements of Euclid with Coloured Diagrams and Symbols | Hacker News Reader

The First 6 Books of the Elements of Euclid with Coloured Diagrams and Symbols

c82.net

48 pointsoidar14 comments

The author, Nicholas Rougeux, has a number of projects with a similarly excellent curation of intellectual and visual beauty.

https://www.c82.net/

Publisher Kronecker Wallis sells an expanded edition of Byrne's opus which includes all thirteen books of Euclid's Elements. It also appears to be reset in a modern typeface.

<https://www.kroneckerwallis.com/product/euclids-elements-com...>

Is it just my phone or are all the "s"s and "f"s accidently mathematical notation on the first book.

There used to be two forms of letter s, long s when medial and short s when final, similar to the two forms of sigma in later Greek. The integral sign derived from this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

Ok, but why choose the outdated one for this? Or is it a mistake?

It's an old book:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Title_pa...

I know it's an old book. I have several copies in multiple languages a couple of meters from where I'm sitting.

None of them have colored designs or interactive elements, so I really struggle to understand your point

Oliver Byrne’s 1847 edition of the elements did have colored designs [0]. This website features a digitization of Byrne’s book and defaults to the text as it appears in the original.

[0] https://maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-t...

> None of them have colored designs or interactive elements

Euclid didn't include interactivity? Seems like a bit of an oversight.

Anyway, that wasn't the question. Check out the S's on that cover.

It's a reproduction of Oliver Byrne's 1847 edition, which uses the long s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:First_six_bo...

Seems like a weird choice to make it colored, interactive etc. - presumably to maximize accessibility/digestibility by laymen - and then adopt an outdated typography choice for coherence with a 180 year old edition

The colors and the weird s were both from the 180 year old version. The interactivity is new. Here's the author's thoughts:

> Creating a faithful online reproduction of a book considered one of the most beautiful and unusual publications ever published is a daunting task. Byrne’s Euclid is my tribute to Oliver Byrne’s most celebrated publication from 1847 that illustrated the geometric principles established in Euclid’s original Elements from 300 BC.

> The long s (ſ) was common in older publications and is used throughout the book. Even though it’s commonly mistaken for the lowercase f, I felt reproducing it was also important to stay true to the original.

> I wanted to add interactivity to the diagrams to aid in understanding them because I had some trouble understanding some in the original book.

Here's lots more thoughts:

https://www.c82.net/blog/?id=79

You can change this by switching to Modern English in the navbar.

I have this book in print and that is my main complaint. It explains the typographical history and I get it…but it still makes it harder to read than necessary.

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