It’s not every day you get to thumb through a 542 year old copy of Euclid’s “Elements of Geometry” in the Institute for Advanced Studies library. I can’t believe I was able to even touch the pages of this masterpiece.
This 1482 edition was the first printed version of Euclid’s seminal work, published in Venice by Erhard Ratdolt. It was based on the Latin translation by Campanus of Novara, which was itself a translation from the original Arabic.