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St. John's College

Heath was active in the late 19th and early 20th century, passing away in 1940, but meanwhile another point of view developed. St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe), which had been a military school since colonial times, preceding the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, to which it is adjacent, in 1936 lost its accreditation and was on the brink of bankruptcy. In desperation the board summoned Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan from the University of Chicago, where they had been developing a new theoretical program for instruction of the Classics. Leaping at the opportunity, in 1937 they instituted the “new program” at St. John's, later dubbed the Great Books program, a fixed curriculum that would teach the works of select key contributors to the culture of western civilization. At St. John's, Apollonius came to be taught as himself, not as some adjunct to analytic geometry.

The “tutor” of Apollonius was R. Catesby Taliaferro, a new PhD in 1937 from the University of Virginia. He tutored until 1942 and then later for one year in 1948, supplying the English translations by himself, translating Ptolemy's Almagest and Apollonius’ Conics. These translations became part of the Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World series. Only Books I-III are included, with an appendix for special topics (a translation of Book IV of the Conics by Michael N. Fried was produced in 2002). Unlike Heath, Taliaferro did not attempt to reorganize Apollonius, even superficially, or to rewrite him. His translation into modern English follows the Greek fairly closely. He does use modern geometric notation to some degree.