Did Euclid Exist?

When I was researching the course that became the Fun Calculus Program I googled "calculus without limits" and found the website of C.K. Raju, award-winning Indian physicist, mathematician and author. Having my idea of teaching a quick, pragmatic calculus course scooped by one of the guys responsible for developing Param, India's supercomputer, wasn't such a disappointment. I figured I still had his five-session course beat in terms of historical context, but, not surprisingly, Dr. Raju has some earth-shaking ideas about the history of mathematics, too.

Raju's paper Towards Equity in Mathematics Education 1.Good-Bye Euclid! explores the suspiciously few facts that have come down to us about the Father of Mathematics himself, Euclid. The main mention of Euclid was by 5th century philosopher Proclus, and our sources for Proclus are dated at least five hundred years after he died. Raju teases us with the suggestion that the Elements may have been a product of Eastern-influenced philosophy the Church found uncomfortable.

So while the Church and its flock busied themselves burning books and lynching scholars like Hypatia, the Arabs created vast libraries, preserving, translating and developing the ideas in Greek philosophy and science.

"However, as Adelard of Bath, one of the first translators of the Elements, remarked, Muslims accepted reason, while authority prevailed in Christian Europe."

It has come down to us (including my high school history class) that the Arab libraries were simply a huge Public Storage location keeping "our" knowledge safe until we Europeans were ready to reclaim it. In popular culture James Burke's Day the Universe Changed was unique in suggesting the Muslims actually made use of this knowledge and Burke pointed out elsewhere that the universities of Paris (1150), Bologna (1088) and Oxford (1096) were founded, coincidentally, only a few years after the arrival of European translators to the dozens of libraries of Toledo ("liberated" in 1085).

One of the accidental products of this flurry of translation was the creation of the trigonometric term "sine" by over-literal translators. Another may have been the birth of Euclid. Raju tries to trace the etymology of the name itself:

Possibly, the name “Euclid” was inspired by a similar translation error made at Toledo regarding the term uclides which has been rendered by some Arabic authors as ucli (key) + des (direction, space). So, uclides, meaning “the key to geometry”, was possibly misinterpreted as a Greek name Euclide.

It's a fascinating possibility. We mathematicians like to believe we have a personal relationship with Euclid; how could he not have existed?

Raju's works are full of such thought-provoking perspectives. I agree with him that the Western idea of proof is a religious one; the above statement that authority prevailed in Europe is no less true in mathematics. Having thrown off religious authority, math still seems to need the comforting authority of proof.