I'm currently taking a class in The History of Mathematics and it's very interesting, with the additional bonus of a minimal workload.

We have so far spent quite a lot of time analyzing Euclid's Elements from a mathematical-historical perspective, even more so than in the class I took completely dedicated to basic Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometry. In all honesty, I never really enjoyed geometry much, I often found it tedious, boring and uninteresting. What made it somewhat bearable was its axiomatic deductive structure which appeals to me.

However, It wasn't until I stumbled upon various models of Non-Euclidean geometry, i.e. models of geometry in which the negation of the parallel postulate holds true, and in particular the very simple yet beautiful Beltrami-Klein model that I truly started to appreciate geometry in all its glory. Non-Euclidean models combined with an excellent class on basic differential geometry helped me put ordinary high school style geometry into a deeper perspective. When I realized that geometries can be really weird the subject became interesting to me.

Back to the topic at hand. We got some exercises connected to Euclid's Elements and that gave me a good excuse to dust off my Swedish copy from 1867.

Unfortunately my copy only contains the first six, the eleventh and twelfth book. Which basically means that it lacks all the good stuff. No Pythagorean mysticism for me.

I think it's a beautiful book and I wanted to share some blurry pictures from it.