Ōu jǐlǐdé 歐几里得 / Euclid of Alexandria
Greek mathematician of the 3rd century BCE; active at Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter (323–283 BCE). The Chinese name Ōu jǐlǐdé (with Sìkù-period orthographic variation 歐几里得 / 歐幾里得) is the conventional Wàn-lì-period transcription introduced by Matteo Ricci (利瑪竇).
The author of the Stoicheia (Στοιχεῖα), in 13 books — universally known in the Latin tradition as the Elements — the foundational text of Greek systematic geometry and the most influential mathematical work in the Western tradition. The work systematizes plane geometry (books I–IV), proportion theory (book V), similar figures (book VI), elementary number theory (books VII–IX), incommensurables (book X), and solid geometry (books XI–XIII), all developed deductively from a small set of postulates and common notions. The Elements defined the standards of mathematical proof and the canonical structure of geometric exposition for over two millennia.
Through the post-Hellenistic and medieval Arabic transmission (notably the Tahrir of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, 13th century), the Elements reached the European Renaissance. The standard 16th-century Latin edition was Christopher Clavius S.J.’s 1574 Euclidis Elementorum libri XV (Rome) — which expanded the original 13 books with two further books (numbered XIV and XV) of Hellenistic-period Euclidean material attributed to Hypsicles of Alexandria and others. It was through Clavius’s recension — Clavius having been Matteo Ricci’s mathematics teacher at the Roman College in the late 1570s — that Euclid reached China.
The Ricci-Xú Guāngqǐ Chinese translation of the first 6 books of Euclid (the plane-geometry books) appeared as the Jǐhé yuánběn 幾何原本 (KR3f0047) in 1607. The translation is the foundational text of the post-Wàn-lì Chinese-Western mathematical engagement and one of the most consequential cross-cultural intellectual transmissions in pre-modern history. Through the Ricci-Xú translation, Euclidean axiomatic-deductive geometry entered the Chinese mathematical tradition, supplying the rigorous-proof methodology that the indigenous Chinese tradition (with its problem-and-solution structure) had not systematically developed.
The remaining 9 books of Euclid + the 2 Clavius supplementary books (books VII through XV in Clavius’s enumeration) were not translated into Chinese until Alexander Wylie (1815-1887) and Lǐ Shànlán 李善蘭 (1810-1882) completed the translation in 1857 — a 250-year gap from the Ricci-Xú first 6 books.
The Sìkù 提要 of KR3f0047 gives Euclid as 歐几里得 (with the orthographic variation), notes that “Euclid’s time-period is not known in detail” (i.e., the exact dates of Euclid’s life were not transmitted in the Chinese-language sources available to the Sìkù editors), and acknowledges the complete-and-extensive 15-book structure with Clavius’s continuation. The 提要 commends the Jǐhé yuánběn as “the crown of Western technique” (biànmiǎn Xīshù 弁冕西術) — the most enthusiastic editorial endorsement any Western technical work receives in the Sìkù corpus.