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Apollonius is a vital figure in the history of Greek mathematics. He
was known to have a son, according to written reports from his public
presentations, but little else is known about his personal life. Apollonius
is remembered not only for his own work, but also as a chronicler of
Greek mathematics. His eight-volume work entitled Conics (of which only
seven survive to this day) organized and expanded the most well known
mathematical results of his time. While the first four volumes are commonly
seen as a compendium of pre-existing results, including a presentation
of many of the discoveries of Archimedes and Euclid, volumes five through
seven are generally considered to be almost wholly original work. He
is believed to be the first to establish many of the fundamental properties
of parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas. Apollonius apparently wrote
other books, but no copies of these are currently known to have survived.
His contemporaries sometimes cite his other works; one of these early
works, entitled Quick Delivery included one of the earliest approximations
of pi to the nearest one thousandth. Many of his ideas were important
in the later development of analytic geometry, projective geometry,
and topics in calculus.
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