Apollonius of Perga: Conics Book IV

A first English translation of Book IV of Apollonius's Conics, translated and annotated by Michael N. Fried, as a companion volume to our edition of Conics Books I-III. Conics IV deals with the way pairs of conic sections can intersect or touch each other. In his Introduction to the translation, Fried shows that this book has been misappraised by scholars too much inclined to see Apollonius's work merely as a precursor to the analytic geometry of the seventeenth century. He writes, Playfulness is one of the real delights of Book IV. One can see in this playfulness the artful way Apollonius contends with the main challenge of the book - the problem of how the opposite sections, specifically, meet other sections of a cone and other opposite sections - how he gives this problem both foundation and context.