Abstract
Book II is short and homogeneous, with only 14 propositions and two definitions at the beginning. For the most part it is about various combinations of rectangles and squares of equal content. At the end we find the generalization of the theorem of Pythagoras to what today is called the law of cosines and, as the last proposition, the squaring of a rectangle. There are reasons to assume a Pythagorean origin for the main part of Book II, but some historians have different opinions.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Artmann, B. (1999). Euclid Book II: The Geometry of Rectangles. In: Euclid—The Creation of Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1412-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1412-0_7
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7134-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-1412-0
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