[The books of Euclid pass on to us] something admirable and very necessary to see and to read, namely the order in the method of writing on mathematics in that aforementioned time of the wise age.

Géographie, in Les Oeuvres Mathématiques de Simon Stevin de Bruges (1634) ed. Girard, p. 109, as quoted by Jacob Klein]], Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968)