With the publication of this book I discharge a debt which our era has long owed to the memory of a great mathematician of antiquity: to pub lish the /llost books" of the Conics of Apollonius in the form which is the closest we have to the original, the Arabic version of the Banu Musil. Un til now this has been accessible only in Halley's Latin translation of 1710 (and translations into other languages entirely dependent on that). While I yield to none in my admiration for Halley's edition of the Conics, it is far from satisfying the requirements of modern scholarship. In particular, it does not contain the Arabic text. I hope that the present edition will not only remedy those deficiencies, but will also serve as a foundation for the study of the influence of the Conics in the medieval Islamic world. I acknowledge with gratitude the help of a number of institutions and people. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, by the award of one of its Fellowships for 1985-86, enabled me to devote an unbroken year to this project, and to consult essential material in the Bodleian Li brary, Oxford, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Corpus Christi Col lege, Cambridge, appointed me to a Visiting Fellowship in Trinity Term, 1988, which allowed me to make good use of the rich resources of both the University Library, Cambridge, and the Bodleian Library.

Apollonius’s Conics was one of the greatest works of advanced mathematics in antiquity. The work comprised eight books, of which four have come down to us in their original Greek and three in Arabic. By the time the Arabic translations were produced, the eighth book had already been lost. In 1710, Edmond Halley, then Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, produced an edition of the Greek text of the Conics of Books I-IV, a translation into Latin from the Arabic versions of Books V-VII, and a reconstruction of Book VIII. The present work provides the first complete English translation of Halley’s reconstruction of Book VIII with supplementary notes on the text. It also contains 1) an introduction discussing aspects of Apollonius’s Conics 2) an investigation of Edmond Halley's understanding of the nature of his venture into ancient mathematics, and 3) an appendices giving a brief account of Apollonius’s approach to conic sections and his mathematical techniques. This book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the history of ancient Greek mathematics and mathematics in the early modern period.

This publication would not have been what it is without the help of many institutions and people, which I acknowledge most gratefully. I thank the Central Library and Documentation Center, Iran, and its director, Mr. Iraji Afshar, for permission to publish photo graphs of that part of ms. 392 of the Shrine Library, Meshhed, containing Diocles' treatise. I also thank the authorities of the Shrine Library, and especially Mr. Ahmad GolchTn-Ma'anT, for their cooperation in providing photographs of the manuscript. Mr. GolchTn Ma'anT also sent me, most generously, a copy of his catalogue of the astronomical and mathematical manuscripts of the Shrine Library. I am grateful to the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, and the Universiteits-Bibliotheek, Leid'en, for providing me with microfilms of manuscripts I wished to consult, and to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, for granting me access to its manuscripts. The text pages in Arabic script and the Index of Technical Terms were set by a computer-assisted phototypesetting system, using computer programs developed at the University of Washington and a high-speed image-generation phototypesetting device. A continuous stream of text on punched cards was fed through the Katib formatting program, which broke up the text into lines and pages and arranged the section numbers and apparatus on each page. Output from Katib was fed through the compositor program Hattat to create a magnetic tape for use on the VideoComp phototypesetter.

This volume contains a historically sensitive analysis and interpretation of Apollonius of Perga's Conica, one of the greatest works of Hellenistic mathematics. It provides a long overdue alternative to H. G. Zeuthen's Die Lehre von den Kogelschnitten im Altertum.

With the publication of this book I discharge a debt which our era has long owed to the memory of a great mathematician of antiquity: to pub lish the /llost books" of the Conics of Apollonius in the form which is the closest we have to the original, the Arabic version of the Banu Musil. Un til now this has been accessible only in Halley's Latin translation of 1710 (and translations into other languages entirely dependent on that). While I yield to none in my admiration for Halley's edition of the Conics, it is far from satisfying the requirements of modern scholarship. In particular, it does not contain the Arabic text. I hope that the present edition will not only remedy those deficiencies, but will also serve as a foundation for the study of the influence of the Conics in the medieval Islamic world. I acknowledge with gratitude the help of a number of institutions and people. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, by the award of one of its Fellowships for 1985-86, enabled me to devote an unbroken year to this project, and to consult essential material in the Bodleian Li brary, Oxford, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Corpus Christi Col lege, Cambridge, appointed me to a Visiting Fellowship in Trinity Term, 1988, which allowed me to make good use of the rich resources of both the University Library, Cambridge, and the Bodleian Library.