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The works of the ancient Greek mathematicians which we possess represent only a few fragments from the wreck of the great treasure ship of Hellenistic mathematics. What has come down to us is little more than a reflection of the pedagogical interests of the schoolmen of late antiquity and Byzantine times, who caused to be copied only those works which were of some use in the curricula of their institutions of higher education at Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, Constantinople, and a very few other places. Their choice illustrates the impoverished intellectual climate of the Greek world in the millennium from the third to the thirteenth century a.d. Thus the compendium of elementary geometry which goes under the name of Euclid was transmitted through the schoolrooms, but none of the works on higher geometry which Euclid wrote (probably in the early third century b.c.) has been preserved; and only the first four books of Apollonius' Conics, which treat the elements of the theory, continued to be copied in Byzantine times: The last four books, which deal with more advanced topics, are lost in Greek.

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