Christopher Zeeman is a British mathematician who inspired generations of young people, built a world-class maths department from scratch and still manages to find time to correct theorems developed by Euclid in ancient Greece. He spoke to Justin Mullins about what makes maths beautiful and why he will never understand it all.
What’s wrong with Euclid?
I’ve always been fond of The Elements, ‘s book on mathematics, but one definition in it is pretty corny. It says: “a ratio is a sort of relation in respect of size between two magnitudes of the same kind”. To say “sort of relation” seems terribly feeble compared with…
