He went to Alexandria, when quite young to study with successors of Euclid and remained a long time, and that he flourished in the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes.
Apollonius was much admired as a mathematician and that his great work was the Conics. The Conics of Apollonius was at once recognized as the authoritative treatise on the subject and later writers regularly cited it when quoting propositions in conics. Apollonius introduced such terms as ellipse, parabola and hyperbola.
He made a visit to Pergamum, where he made the acquaintance of Eudemus to whom he dedicated the first three of the eight Books of The Conics.
Only the first four Books survive in Greek; the eight Book is altogether lost but the three Books V-VII exist in Arabic.
It was Ahmad and al-Hassan, two sons of Muh. B. Musa b. Shakir, who first contemplated translating the Conics into Arabic.
Apollonius also wrote widely in other subjects including science, medicine and philosophy. In On the Nursing Mirror he showed that parallel rays of light are not brought to a focus by a spherical mirror and he discussed the focal properties of a parabolic mirror.
Apollonius of Perga (255-170 BC) - Greek mathematician
