The most important thing to know about ancient Greek mathematics is how little anyone knows about it. The scant evidence available today is tremendously indirect: reconstructions from unrepresentative survivals of fragments of translations of transcriptions of commentaries on compilations of summaries of allusions to refutations of excerpts of documents produced as part of an oral culture of learning in which the original writing may never have been expected to encapsulate what really mattered. Many centuries separate the people we want to know about and even the oldest materials we have to know them with, and most of what they did and thought is simply and definitively lost.
But that is only the start of the difficulty. Ancient thinkers lived in a very different world, mathematically and otherwise. Much of what we take for granted in mathematics today pushes that world farther away, from such rudiments as numbers and arithmetic to grand conceptions of the universe and the reasoning of mathematical demonstrations.
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