Page 156 - Sarpedon’dan Keykubad’a Bir Zamanlar Antalya

establishing scientific relations with Attalos, the King of Per-
gamon.
Apollonius of Perge had a somewhat selfish, reputation-hun-
gry and arrogant personality. Although these aspects were not
very pleasing in the scientific world, the work he did was so
great that it was enough to overshadow these negative aspects.
Compass introduced many new formulas against multiplication
in mathematics. These weren’t enough. He reached the peak of
fame in the scientific world with his inventions belonging to the
study of conics at that time. Apollonius wrote 8 books in total on
these subjects. So much of importance was in his work on con-
ics that it was even translated into Arabic in the 9th century AD.
A new edition of the same book appeared in the 17th centu-
ry. So much so that, until the Swiss scientist Jakob Steiner, who
lived in the 19th century and made many theoretical and syn-
thetic inventions in the field of geometry, no one could come up
with inventions similar to Apollonius’s in the field of mathemat-
ics. So much so that Apolloni-
us fit all these discoveries into
eight books. Beginning with
the contributions of Euclid and
Archimedes to the subject, he
brought them to the state they
obtained before the invention
of analytical geometry. Defini-
tions of the terms ellipse, pa-
rabola, and hyperbola are are
his and are still in use today.
Apollonius Pergaeus. That
is Apollonius of Perge. This
great scientist is from Aksu,
from Antalya…

Fig. 109: 1654 Edition of Apollo-
nius’ Conica Edited by Francesco
Maurolico

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