Astrolabes are believed to have been around at the time of Apollonius of Perga, a Greek mathematician from the third-century B.C. known as the Great Geometer. Islamic scholars improved the gadgets ...

Apollonius of Perga: Treatise on Conic Sections. Edited in Modern Notation, with Introductions, including an Essay on the Earlier History of the Subject, by T. L. Heath Pp. clxx + 254.