For more than 2,000 years, Euclid’s text was the paradigm of mathematical argumentation and reasoning. “Euclid famously starts with ‘definitions’ that are almost poetic,” Jeremy Avigad, a logician at Carnegie Mellon University, said in an email. But by the 20th century, mathematicians were no longer willing to ground mathematics in this intuitive geometric foundation. Eventually, this formalization allowed mathematics to be translated into computer code. In 2019, Christian Szegedy, a computer scientist formerly at Google and now at a start-up in the Bay Area, predicted that a computer system would match or exceed the problem-solving ability of the best human mathematicians within a decade.

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Persons: Euclid, Jeremy Avigad, “, Avigad, Christian Szegedy Organizations: Getty, Carnegie Mellon University, Google Locations: Los Angeles, Bay