born 0441; 240 BC, Perga, Anatolia
died 0441; 190 BC, Alexandria, Egypt
Mathematician known as "The Great Geometer.
" His Conics was one of the greatest scientific treatises of the ancient world. In it he introduced the terms parabola , ellipse , and hyperbola . Because Conics was fundamental to later advances in optics and astronomy in the Islamic world, a 9th-century Arabic translation survived to fill in for some of the missing Greek original. Generally, his other writings survive only as titles.