I. Introduction:

Apollonius (English: apollonius, date of birth: about 262 BC ~ about 190 BC), an ancient Greek mathematician, is as famous as Euclid and Archimedes. His book On Conic Curve is a brilliant scientific achievement in the ancient world. He completely snared the nature of conic curve, leaving little room for later generations to set foot in it.

Second, the introduction of conic curve theory:

Conic curve theory is a classic, which can be said to represent the highest level of Greek geometry. Since then, there has been no substantial progress in Greek geometry. It was not until17th century that B. Pascal and R. Descartes made a new breakthrough. The Theory of Conic Curves consists of eight volumes, the Greek text of the first four volumes and the Arabic text of the last three volumes are kept, and the last volume is lost.

Contribution and function of conic curve theory;

1, contribution:

This book is a classic of conic curves, and its writing is in the same strain as Euclid and Archimedes. Firstly, several definitions are established, and then the propositions are proved in turn. Reasoning is very strict, and some properties have been proved in Euclid's Elements of Geometry, so they are used as known.

However, the original text did not indicate where it came from, and the source was added in the translation for easy reference. (Compare the original Greek text and English version on pages 280-335 [6]). Later generations have a lot of complaints about this. Archimedes' biographer even said that Apollonius took Archimedes' unpublished work on conic curves as his own.

This statement comes from Otokios' records, but he also said that this view is incorrect. Pappus accused Apollonius of adopting the work of many predecessors (including Euclid) in this field, but never attributed it to these pioneers. Of course, he has made great progress on the basis of his predecessors, and his outstanding contribution should also be affirmed.

2. Function:

The appearance of conic curve theory immediately attracted people's attention and was recognized as an authoritative work in this field. Papos added many lemmas to it, and Cyrus (4th century) and Hipatia also made annotations. Otto Kios revised the first four volumes of notes in Greek.

In the 9th century, there was an upsurge of learning Greek culture in Constantinople (the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire). Four volumes of Otto Kios have been translated into Ansel font (a large font commonly used in manuscripts) and preserved, but some places have been tampered with.