Re: [HM] How early are the mss of Euclid that have the actual diagrams?

Michel Eytan (eytan@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr)
Sat, 23 Oct 1999 06:20:06 +0200

> How early are the mss of Euclid that have the actual diagrams?
> Are those texts presumed to have drawn the diagram from Euclid's
> arguments, rather than being copies of the original diagrams which
> would be presumably copied from copies of ancient Greek mss we no
> longer have. Do we have any idea if the original mss did have
> drawn diagrams?

Just a remark: one should beware of reconstituted diagrams!

I can tell a story to illustrate this: quite some time ago(!), when I was
working under G.Th. Guilbaud at the EHESS in what later became the Centre
de Mathematique Sociale I was assigned the job of reconstructing the
diagrams for a treatise of (elementary) Geometry written by Florimond de
Beaune -- a contemporary of Descartes -- that had been discovered by Pere
Costabel at that time. I undertook the job as well as I could, but after 3
months was advised that my work was useless, since the diagrams by
Florimond de Beaune himself, accompanying originally the manuscript, had
been found. I still wanted to compare my own diagrams to the original ones.
Woe to me! They were *entirely different* from what I had reconstituted...

Michel Eytan eytan@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr