Apollonius of Perga

Apollonius of Perga, fl. 247–205 B.C., Greek mathematician of the Alexandrian school. He produced a treatise on conic sections that included, as well as his own work, much of the work of his predecessors, among whom was Euclid. Apollonius introduced the terms parabola, hyperbola, and ellipse. In his works Greek mathematics reached its culmination.

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Apollonius of Perga

(born c. 240 BC, Perga, Anatolia—died c. 190 BC, Alexandria, Egypt) Mathematician known as “The Great Geometer.” His Conics was one of the greatest scientific treatises of the ancient world. In it he introduced the terms parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola. Because Conics was fundamental to later advances in optics and astronomy in the Islamic world, a 9th-century Arabic translation survived to fill in for some of the missing Greek original. Generally, his other writings survive only as titles.