Beginning of Essay
Apollonius was a great mathematician, known by his contempories as " The Great Geometer, " whose treatise Conics is one of the greatest scientific works from the ancient world. Most of his other treatise were lost, although their titles and a general indication of ....

Middle of Essay
.... fullest use of his predecessors' works. Book 1-4 contain a systematic account of the essential principles of conics, which for the most part had been previously set forth by Euclid, Aristaeus and Menaechmus. A number of theorems in Book 3 and the greater part of Book 4 are new, however, and he introduced the terms parabola, eelipse, and hyperbola. Books 5-7 are clearly original. His genius takes its highest flight in Book 5, in which he considers normals as minimum and maximum straight lines drawn from given points to the curve ( independently of tangent properties ), discusses how many normals can be drawn from particular points, finds their feet ....