After five years of graduate study, I finally found myself teaching in a small liberal arts college on the Chesapeake Bay. The St. John’s program is a mostly all-required curriculum in which students and faculty move through classes on language, history, mathematics, natural science, music, poetry, and philosophy. For the most part we restrict ourselves to primary texts. I began reading books by ancient mathematicians including Euclid, Ptolemy, and Apollonius, and discovered firsthand how this material is not only rich and beautiful on its own terms, but also crucial for understanding important aspects of modern philosophy.
