Apollonius was one of the founding fathers of mathematical astronomy in ancient Greece. He also originated the geometric shapes and terms that would become central to Newtonian astronomical physics nearly 20 centuries later. He may have even prefigured Christiaan Huygens' 1673 use of the "evolute," the locus of the centers of curvature in a given curve. Certainly the projective geometry of Gérard Desargues and Blaise Pascal owe their genesis to Apollonius. He also invented his own counting system for very large numbers. Still considered the greatest achievement of Greek geometry, the Conicsearned Apollonius the moniker "The Great Geometer," according to a later mathematician, Eutocius. These books quickly supplanted the works of Euclid as authoritative texts.

Estimations of the time frame in which Apollonius lived have varied over the years, so much so that one reference will only place him in the second half of third century B...