The immediate successors to Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius
prolonged the great Greek geometrical tradition for a time, but then it
began steadily to languish, and new developments were limited to astronomy,
trigonometry, and algebra. Then toward the end of the third century A .D.,
500 years after Apollonius, there lived the enthusiastic and competent
Pappus of Alexandria, who strove to rekindle fresh interest in the subject.