Apollonius of Perga

Apollonius of Perga was the great geometer of the generation after Archimedes, working in Alexandria around 200 BCE, whose Conics, in eight books of which seven survive, gave the ellipse, parabola and hyperbola their names and worked out their properties so completely that nothing was added until Descartes. Kepler needed the ellipse for the planets and Newton needed the whole treatise for the Principia, and Thomas Aquinas College reads it in sophomore year for that reason. Almost nothing is known of his life, and the last book was lost by the tenth century.