Euclid brief biography of abraham lincoln

After serving his one term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847–1849), Abraham Lincoln returned to his law practice in Springfield, Illinois, and undertook a personal intellectual challenge. As he later explained in a brief autobiography he wrote for the 1860 presidential campaign, he had “studied and nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid, since he was a member of Congress.”[1] Lincoln’s triumph over Euclid, coming as it did in his early forties, was noteworthy. In the opinion of John G. Nicolay and John Hay, two of his White House secretaries during the Civil War, Lincoln’s achievement proved “his unusual powers of mental discipline.” For Lincoln, though, he plowed through Euclid’s theorems and proofs in order to correct—at least in part—a shortcoming that haunted him all his life: “his want of education,” particularly his lack of an academy or college degree. His formal education had been limited to attending school in his childhood “by littles,” as he so charmingly put it

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