Reddit reviews Oliver Byrne: The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid (VARIA)

I agree with the others; PICS!

I have the Oliver Byrne edition, which I love because of how it depicts the proofs graphically:
https://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Byrne-First-Elements-Euclid/dp/3836544717/

Fun project. This must have taken a considerable amount of work.

For anyone interested I highly highly recommend buying a copy of the relatively recent Taschen reprint, which is absolutely lovely, and not all that expensive. https://amzn.com/3836544717

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    Mild comments/criticisms:
    
    I wonder why the author decided to add little letters. I think they detract from the overall effect, since the whole point is referring to shapes by their appearance directly instead of giving them symbolic names. [Edit: just noticed that this is only an option. I was looking at the pictures instead of reading the page. :)]
    
    The color choices of the original are a bit better (on this one the red and especially blue colors are distractingly intense, the blue is too purplish, and the yellow is a bit greenish and a bit muddy). I’d recommend printing this on slightly off-white paper.
    
    I really like some of the typographical features in the original that have been lost here, such as slight space before colons and semicolons, generous extra space at the beginning of sentences, the very bold large +, =, etc. signs between shapes, and the very large main diagram for every proposition. The original (Caslon?) typeface also seems slightly more appropriate, in its quirky Englishness.

The font used in Vakil's notes and the one used in Hatcher's Algebraic Topology are beautiful. If I knew where to find such gorgeous fonts, I would probably write my work in latex rather than on looseleaf paper.

I just received my copy of Bryne's Euclid's Elements in the mail. It's a wonderful idea that deserves more attention among authors of "serious mathematics".

Oliver Byrne's illustrated edition of Euclid's elements is pretty.

For something more serious, have a look at Proofs from THE BOOK, a collection of 'beautiful' proofs, inspired by Erdős' terminology.

Get that kid a spirograph! The math behind how they work will obviously be way over his head, but if he's never played with one I bet he'd have a ball. Also, if you've never seen Oliver Byrnes' 1847 illustrated version of the first six books of Euclid's Elements, go buy a copy. You're a math major, you need this on your bookshelf for yourself to begin with! (I may or may not be plotting a Kickstarter to publish it with all the old elongated 'S's changed to modern ones to make it more readable and w/ more modern and concise translations in the margins; I would KILL to have this as a more usable resource for studying as a visual learner) And, yeah, the kid my struggle with the really dry proofiness of the text, especially with the weird 'S's, but he'd still be able to understand the images, which is what's really important. It'd give him a chance to see just how deep symmetry can get in math, I think. But yeah, at least give that kid the link to the UBC site with all the scans so he can check it out!

Also, this kid sounds like he's going to grow up to be a righteous math nerd if he's already so interested in something like that. PLEASE DO ALL YOU CAN TO ENCOURAGE HIS ENTHUSIASM! Make him into one of us. >3