Definition for Euclid
From Biology Forums Dictionary
Euclid (? to 250 B.C.E.): Greek mathematician who taught in Alexandria around 300 B.C.E., and who was probably the founder of its mathematical school. His chief existing work is the 13-volume Elements, which became the most widely known mathematical book of Classical antiquity, and is still much used in geometry. The approach and his axioms became known as Euclidean geometry. Euclid, of course, produced his theorems from a small set of axioms, definitions, and postulates; of these, the fifth (or so-called ‘parallel’ postulate) has proved most controversial. Attempts to prove this obscurely stated postulate as a theorem have historically failed; at the same time, alternate geometries which replace it with alternate postulates, such as Lobachevski’s, have arisen which prove to be as consistent as Euclid’s own, while producing theorems which have opposite truth values when compared outside the systems themselves.