Augustus De Morgan on Euclid’s Elements
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“The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid.”
“No one has ever given so easy and natural a chain of geometrical consequences [as Euclid]. There is a never-erring truth in the results.”
“The thirteen books of Euclid must have been a tremendous advance, probably even greater than that contained in the “Principia” of Newton,”
“If we consider him [Euclid] as meaning to be what his commentators have taken him to be, a model of the most unscrupulous formal rigour, we can deny that he has altogether succeeded, though we admit that he made the nearest approach.”
“In England the geometry studied is that of Euclid, and I hope it never will be any other; for this reason, that so much has been written on Euclid, and all the difficulties of geometry have so uniformly been considered with reference to the form in which they appear in Euclid, that the study of that author is a better key to a great quantity of useful reading than any other.”