Edmond Halley's reconstruction of the lost book of Apollonius's Conics : translation and commentary / Michael N. Fried

As the title indicates, the book contains an exact translation of Halley’s reconstruction of the lost eighths book of Apollonius’s Conics, with the explanation of the text in terms of algebraic formulas relegated to the footnotes. The translation is preceded by a valuable introduction which elucidates the intellectual basis of Halley’s reconstruction based on indications by Apollonius and Pappus which makes it probable that while the detailed problems solved by Halley probably were not Apollonius’s, the spirit of most of his text is closely comparable to that of Apollonius. The author is correctly opposed to the notion of a Greek “geometric algebra”. The places where modern thought intrudes in the text are clearly indicated in introduction and notes. An appendix is helpful to the reader; among others it explains Hipparchus’s quadrature of the lune. {Since in the notes to the translation the author uses Greek letters (though there are accent problems on pp. 66, 78) it is somewhat irritating to have Greek in Latin letters in the introduction.} (zbMath)