To create videos and PDF documents that can describe Euclid's Elements in a more modern approach (i.e. using algebra to describe what is going on, rather than just using words)
- PDFs: Look in the
Propositions/PDFfolder - Videos: https://www.youtube.com/sandybultena
Many moons ago, I wnated to revisit my university geometry course, by going through all the examples in the text book. Unfortunately, the textbook assumed I had remembered all of my rudimentary geometry, which I had not.
I decided that I would work my way through the Elements, and teach myself what I had forgotten. I bought a book, based on the Heath's translation. I tried reading the book. Keeping track of angles ABC, ACB and BCA with line AB etc, was too hard to keep track of for me. And then reading all the text just got me confused unless I started labelling the lines and angles, and writing the algebra.
So, I decided, we live in a modern age, let me check youtube. I could not find any videos that explained the Elements in any way other than a Heath's translation.
So that is how I came upon the idea of creating my own videos.
These videos/pdfs are not for advance mathematicians or purists. I am loosely translating the Elements. I gloss over the finer details. For example, Euclid makes a distinction between a measure and a number. I do not.
Some comments on my youtube channel have been written by people who are obviously very upset with me over this issue. I do not plan to change my approach.
I am a coder by profession and hobby. I did not like the tools that were available, so I created my own in perl/Tk. However, as time passed, it was no longer feasible to maintain perl/Tk (it stopped working on my new Mac) so I commissioned Alex Emily Oxorn to rewrite the tools in python using 3b1b manim libraries.
This library, located in directory ./euclidlib
- Python 3.12
- manimlib v1.7.1 by 3b1b github (this in turn requires 3rd party software)
(c) Sandy Bultena 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2026
licensed under the http://creativecommons.org/llicenses/by-nc/3.0
* Note that Book1 python propositions were translated from perl to python by Alex Emily Oxorn
(library using manimgl) (./euclidlib) (c) Alex Emily Oxorn 2026
(library using perl/tk) (./lib) (c) Sandy Bultena 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.
Feel free to raise issues, or create pull requests for improvements or corrections.