Reading Euclid: Euclid's Elements of Geometry and its reception in Britain and Ireland, 1570-1700

Euclid's Elements of Geometry was written in about 300 B.C. in Alexandria on the north coast of Egypt. Its long history of active use and re-use passes through the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages as well as the European Renaissance, and it has been a touchstone for mathematical training as well as a spur to new mathematical research for more than two thousand years. This project looks at Euclid's Elements in Britain and Ireland during the century of the Scientific Revolution, when standards of geometrical proof were being actively questioned by mathematicians, but when geometrical methods were also being deliberately brought into other fields, most obviously natural philosophy.

In the period from 1560 to 1700 dozens of new editions of the Elements were printed, and it was certainly the most widely read mathematical book of the time. We will study these editions and the choices they made - about the content and layout of the Elements, which topics to include and which versions of the proofs to print - to help understand the unique position the book occupied and how that position was shaped and maintained.

We will also study the things people did when they had the Elements in their hands. Some wrote in it; some cut out the diagrams; some pasted in extra material. By looking at many examples we will build up a picture of the kinds of ways early modern people engaged with the Elements - schoolchildren, working men, teachers and scholars - which will help to understand the book's role in their lives and in culture.

No mathematical book had such an impact on early modern culture, yet the Elements in this period has never been the subject of a dedicated study. The proposed project will involve two years of work on archival and printed sources in Oxford and London.

The project addresses three themes that are of perennial public interest: early modern British life, history of science, and how to teach and learn mathematics. The project will prove important new information about neglected aspects of early modern British culture such as mathematical practice and the growth of scientific knowledge. It will fill a gap in our knowledge about the history of science by looking at how mathematics was part of culture in the past and why it mattered so much. And it will provide rigorous background for discussions about mathematics education and the use of Euclidean geometry in the classroom.

The public will be able to engage directly with the project through our project blog and Twitter feed, and we will use the website of the British Society for History of Mathematics to reach an audience including teachers and interested lay people with news about the project. We will also actively seek opportunities to raise the profile of the project with contributions to other blogs, websites and magazines.

The two planned workshops will attract participants from a range of backgrounds including members of the BSHM, museum curators and popularizers, providing a route for the results of our work to be disseminated more widely still to the general public.

Finally the public will be able to visit the display we will organise in Blackwell Hall at the Bodleian Library: a popular city-centre space that attracts a lot of footfall. Here the story of Euclid's Elements will be told using images and objects based on the results of our work.