Petrus Ramus, the great French educational reformer killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, spent his career insisting that mathematics belonged to practical life — to surveyors, builders, and navigators as much as to scholars. The Way To Geometry, translated into English by William Bedwell in 1636, is his geometry course in that spirit: definitions, theorems and constructions arranged for use, with the measuring of heights, distances and fields never far from view.
It is a window onto mathematics as the seventeenth century actually learned it, decades before Newton — geometry as a craft to be mastered rather than a purity to be admired. Download the free EPUB and walk the old road from point and line to the measure of the world.