The coming fight in American healthcare is not really between doctors and artificial intelligence. It is actually between two institutional visions of AI. In one, AI gives physicians back the time and autonomy that industrial medicine has taken away. It reads records, reconciles medications, drafts notes, identifies care gaps, anticipates complications, and helps clinicians see patterns across years of fragmented data. The doctor has more time to examine the patient, reason through uncertainty, explain choices, and accept responsibility for the final decision. In the other vision, AI becomes the insurance industry's most powerful administrative weapon: a machine that can deny, delay, demand documentation, narrow treatment pathways, and turn every clinical encounter into a contest over authorization and payment. Insurance may finally be able to control the clinical delivery of care itself using opaque proprietary care models and significantly expanding its foothold beyond the 20 percent medical loss they are currently allowed. Only AI can be in network while other doctors are not. So effectively Insurance can control everything. The technology may be the same. The governing incentives are not. For years, American medicine has been told that every new layer of administration would improve quality while lowering cost. Some of us may remember the namesake of the authors of the article below in JAMA also pushed for ACA as the panacea. Electronic records were supposed to create interoperability. Prior authorization was supposed to prevent waste. Managed care was supposed to align incentives. More billing codes were supposed to create precision. Instead, physicians inherited a system in which an extraordinary share of clinical effort is spent proving that care was necessary to organizations that were not present in the examination room. AI could make that burden disappear. Or it could make it exponential. These are the strategic forces. I will write more about how the doctors must respond later tonight.

Euclid Who Was Two Men: How a Renaissance Mistake Unraveled the True History of Euclid By @shreehistory On the title page of a large mathematical book printed in Venice in 1509, Euclid appears in the wrong city. The error is announced with Renaissance confidence. The author is identified as Euclidis Megarensis, Euclid of Megara, the "most acute philosopher" and undisputed prince of mathematicians. The volume's editor was Luca Pacioli, the Franciscan friar, mathematician, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli explained that copyists had corrupted the work so badly that Euclid himself had become almost unrecognizable. He promised to cleanse the text, restore its disordered diagrams, and illuminate obscure passages with commentary. Pacioli succeeded in producing a handsome book. He did not succeed in identifying its supposed author. The Misplaced Philosopher Pacioli's mistake was already old when he printed it. In 1482, twenty-seven years before his edition, the Venetian printer Erhard Ratdolt issued the first printed Elements. That volume also described its author as Euclid of Megara. It descended from a medieval Latin recension associated with Campanus of Novara, who had worked with material shaped by the earlier Arabic to Latin translation movement. Pacioli's book was an emended and annotated version of this Campanus tradition. The mistake proved tenacious. In 1570, Henry Billingsley published the first complete English translation under a title that again called Euclid "of Megara." Yet Billingsley had worked from the printed Greek text as well as Latin sources. The incorrect hometown persisted even when the linguistic path to the mathematics had changed. There is something almost reassuring about the error's banality. A familiar biographical label was copied forward. A printer repeated an earlier printer, an editor inherited an identification from the books on his desk. Renaissance humanists, for all their philological brilliance, did not possess searchable databases. They worked from whichever manuscripts, printed editions, and biographical compilations had survived within reach. The confusion of the two Euclids is a real historical discovery. It tells us how uncertain Renaissance scholars could be about the ancient authors they revered. It also warns against reading a title page as if it were a birth certificate. Pacioli's Megarensis is evidence about Pacioli's received tradition, not direct evidence about the identity, or nonexistence, of a mathematician who may have lived nearly eighteen centuries before him. A Biography Made of Fog Euclid of Alexandria, as he appears in popular histories, has the neatness of a figure in a schoolroom mural. He flourished around 300 BCE, worked in Alexandria under Ptolemy I, perhaps studied in the Platonic tradition, and wrote the Elements. When the king supposedly asked whether geometry might be learned more quickly, Euclid replied that there was no royal road to it. Nearly every detail in that portrait becomes unstable under examination. No securely contemporary biography survives. There is no known inscription naming Euclid, no letter in his hand, no ancient portrait, no reliable notice of his birthplace, teachers, family, or institutional position. Alexander Jones, in an essay aptly titled "Euclid, the Elusive Geometer," dismantled the embellished modern life. Athens, Plato's Academy, royal patronage, and employment at the Alexandrian Museum are not established facts. Even the conventional date of about 300 BCE depends heavily on late evidence and chronological inference. The famous royal road anecdote comes from Proclus, who wrote in the fifth century CE, perhaps seven centuries after the presumed Euclid. Proclus also portrayed Euclid as belonging to the Platonic philosophical succession, but this appears to have been inferred from mathematical content rather than preserved from an independent biography. One response to this emptiness is to fill it. Another is to declare the man fictional. Both moves are more confident than the evidence allows. The Elements is particularly impersonal. It contains no autobiographical preface and almost no authorial self-display. It speaks in the austere grammar of construction and proof. A line is drawn, a circle is described, a conclusion follows. The personality behind the imperative vanishes. The earliest authentic surviving reference is found in a prefatory letter attached to Apollonius's Conics. Apollonius, writing in the Hellenistic period, criticizes Euclid's treatment of a difficult geometrical problem. The reference is technical and not especially reverent. It treats Euclid as an earlier mathematician whose work could be found incomplete. This is not a contemporary employment record, but it is awkward evidence for the idea of a late fabrication. Invented culture heroes tend to arrive polished. The Euclid of Apollonius arrives as a predecessor who failed to finish something. The Book Without an Original No manuscript in Euclid's hand survives. This is sometimes presented as suspicious, but it is ordinary for ancient literature. Papyrus decays, libraries burn, and parchment is scraped and reused. Books survive because someone keeps copying them. The oldest dated, nearly complete Greek manuscript of the common version of the Elements was copied in Constantinople in 888 by a scribe named Stephanos for Arethas of Patras. Now catalogued as Bodleian MS D’Orville 301, it contains the thirteen books and preserves the recension associated with Theon of Alexandria, a fourth-century mathematician and commentator. Theon matters because the Elements was not transmitted untouched. He edited it. He clarified proofs, standardized expressions, inserted material, and produced a recension that came to dominate the Greek manuscript tradition. To say that Theon edited Euclid is not to say that Theon invented Euclid. A medical textbook may acquire new chapters through successive editions without having been fabricated by its latest editor. The distinction between composition and transmission is the ordinary work of textual history. This gives the second and third layers of the story: composite inheritance, revised text. Proclus himself credited Euclid with organizing and completing work associated with earlier geometers, including Eudoxus and Theaetetus. Baghdad's Euclid When the Elements entered Arabic, it did not enter a waiting room. It entered a working mathematical culture. Accounts of the Abbasid translation movement identify al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn Matar as an early Arabic translator, producing versions associated with the reigns of Harun al-Rashid and al-Mamun. Later, Ishaq ibn Hunayn made another translation, traditionally said to have been revised by Thabit ibn Qurra. Syriac-speaking Christians formed an important part of the intellectual environment in which Greek science was carried into Arabic. Hunayn ibn Ishaq and members of his circle worked across Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. Arabic mathematicians did not merely protect a foreign heirloom. Al-Nayrizi commented on the Elements. Ibn al-Haytham investigated Euclidean definitions and the parallel postulate. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi produced a major recension. Dozens of Arabic commentaries are known. The text was tested, rearranged, and placed in conversation with arithmetic, algebra, astronomy, optics, and philosophy. The word "preserved," though complimentary, can diminish this work by making scholars sound like warehouse clerks. They translated because they wanted to use, criticize, teach, and improve the mathematics. In the twelfth century, scholars such as Adelard of Bath translated Arabic Euclidean material into Latin. Campanus of Novara later produced the influential Latin recension that would become the basis of Ratdolt's 1482 printing and, in revised form, Pacioli's book. The Latin West did not simply "rediscover Greece." It encountered a Greek mathematical corpus after centuries of Arabic scholarship had helped select, explain, and reshape what Europe received. There was no single recovery. There were reunions among textual branches that had been separated, revised, and taught in different languages. The Geometry of the Altar A more complete history must also look east of the Greek and Arabic worlds, not because an unrecorded Indian source must be assigned to the Elements, but because geometry was never the possession of one civilization. The Indian Sulbasūtras (शुल्बसूत्र), manuals connected with Vedic (वैदिक) altar construction, preserve sophisticated geometrical rules from the first millennium BCE. The Baudhāyana (बौधायन) Sulbasūtra is generally placed somewhere between 800 and 400 BCE. These texts describe transformations among squares, rectangles, circles, and other figures. They state the diagonal relation now called the Pythagorean theorem, use its converse in practical constructions, list triples, and provide a remarkably accurate approximation to the square root of two. Their geometry arose in a ritual and constructional setting, where altars of different shapes had to preserve prescribed areas. The chronology is significant. Babylonian tablets provide still earlier evidence of the diagonal relation. The theorem's familiar Greek name is therefore not a certificate of first discovery. Indian and Greek geometry sometimes address similar problems. But similarity alone cannot establish literary dependence, much less the direction of borrowing. No demonstrated chain currently turns the Sulbasūtras into the hidden original of Euclid's thirteen books. The forms of exposition are also different. The Sulbasūtras give compressed rules embedded in ritual practice. The Elements arranges definitions, assumptions, constructions, and proofs into a sustained deductive sequence. India's mathematical standing does not depend on annexing Euclid. Its geometry deserves recognition because the texts themselves survive and because their procedures can be studied. Later Indian accomplishments in place value notation, arithmetic algorithms, algebra, trigonometry, combinatorics, astronomy, and infinite series require no borrowed Greek prestige. The strongest correction to an old Eurocentric history is not another exclusive origin story. It is a history capable of holding several creative traditions at once. The Temptation of the Clean Fraud The fictional Euclid theory has emotional advantages. It transforms a difficult archive into a solved crime. Missing records become evidence of erasure. Contradictory labels become fingerprints. The Arabic route becomes the scene of appropriation. A friar's title page becomes the confession. Conspiracy arguments often use real criticism of the historical canon as a solvent. European scholarship did minimize Indian mathematics. It did often describe Arabic scholars as passive custodians of Greek genius. Colonial education did construct hierarchies in which Greece became the unique source of reason. Those histories deserve revision. But a true general indictment cannot prove every particular accusation. Institutional Eurocentrism does not establish that the Church invented Euclid. Arabic mediation does not establish Arabic composition. Indian priority for particular geometrical knowledge does not establish Indian authorship of the Elements. Theon's editorial interventions do not establish that Theon wrote the entire corpus. Each proposition requires evidence of its own. The same restraint must apply to the conventional account. An ancient reference to Euclid does not validate the royal road anecdote. A Greek manuscript does not show that every proposition originated in Greece. A traditional authorial name does not prove that one person composed all thirteen books in their received form. The archival facts resist both kinds of purity. Euclid in Layers A historically defensible Euclid can be assembled, provided the seams remain visible. The first layer is a probable Hellenistic mathematician or editor. Apollonius's technical criticism is good evidence that a mathematician named Euclid, associated with advanced geometrical work, preceded him. Later ancient writers consistently knew Euclid as a mathematical author. The conventional Alexandrian setting is plausible, but the surviving evidence does not give the certainty often implied by the phrase "Euclid of Alexandria." The second layer is a composite intellectual inheritance. The Elements gathers geometry, proportion theory, arithmetic, irrational magnitudes, and solid geometry developed across earlier generations. "Author" need not mean inventor of every theorem. Euclid's possible achievement may have been architectural: selection, ordering, proof, and the construction of a curriculum. The third layer is a multiply revised text. Theon's recension, non-Theonine readings, ancient papyri, Byzantine manuscripts, scholia, and Arabic versions show that the book had a textual life. What modern readers call "Euclid" is the result of critical reconstruction from witnesses that do not perfectly agree. The fourth layer is a shared transmission history. Greek scribes, Syriac Christian translators and scholars, Arabic translators and mathematicians, Byzantine copyists, Latin adapters, Jewish translators, Renaissance humanists, printers, schoolmasters, and modern textual critics all participated. Their roles were not identical. Some copied. Some translated. Some commented. Some reorganized. Some corrected. Some misidentified the author. Some made the book available to new publics. None owned the whole river. This layered model is less satisfying than a hero story and less thrilling than an expose. It is also closer to the evidence. The Man on the Title Page Return to Venice in 1509. Pacioli's title page now looks different. It is not the first announcement of Euclid to the world. Nor is it merely a foolish error. It is a compressed map of transmission. The name "Euclid of Megara" is subject to medieval biographical confusion. The reference to Campanus carries the Latin recension. Behind Campanus stand Arabic translations and commentaries. Behind those stand Greek exemplars, perhaps sometimes approached through Syriac speaking scholarly networks. Pacioli's boast about correcting damaged figures records the instability introduced whenever diagrams are copied by hand. The printed page itself marks a technological transition. Propositions that had travelled in singular manuscripts could now circulate in hundreds of more nearly identical copies. The wrong city does not reveal that Euclid was invented. It reveals how a work can remain authoritative while knowledge of its author deteriorates. The mathematics travelled more reliably than the biography. That may be why the Elements survived so well. A reader did not need to know Euclid's birthplace to reconstruct an equilateral triangle, study the theory of proportion, or follow the proof that prime numbers cannot be exhausted. The book carried its authority in its procedures. Its propositions could be copied by a Byzantine clerk, translated by a scholar in Baghdad, annotated in Latin, printed under the name of the wrong philosopher, and still compel a new reader to move from premise to conclusion. The historical Euclid remains indistinct. His book does not. Yet even "his book" is too simple a phrase. What survives is the work of an author obscured by time, the mathematics of predecessors, the hands of editors, the arguments of commentators, and the linguistic labor of several civilizations. The real discovery on Pacioli's title page is not that Euclid was fictional. It is that cultural memory can preserve a body of thought while misplacing the person attached to it, and that the survival of knowledge is rarely the achievement of one man, one language, or one world. All rights reserved. You must obtain written permission to republish. Twitter users can share, repost, like, and comment, but please provide attribution to @shreehistory, who did all this research.

India does not need a fictitious Euclid theory to establish an extraordinary mathematical antiquity. The Śulbasūtras belong to the first (possibly second) millennium BCE and contain geometrical constructions for ritual altars, transformations of area, use of the diagonal relation commonly called the Pythagorean theorem, its converse in construction, and a notably accurate approximation to the square root of two. Their mathematical content is early, sophisticated, and historically independent; serious scholarship does not require deriving it from Greece. Euclid must die.

Picture proof of how Euclid got repurposed.

Every statement below is a lie. Most egregious lie is second one. PA does not guarantee payment, but guarantees exorbitant prices insurance will demand as patient responsibility.

Uqlidisi is the Euclid they said. Euclid they said wrote elements, a book on geometry. Al-Uqlīdisī’s surviving manuscript has the title "Book of Chapters on Hindu Arithmetic". This they did not say. But I read the original manuscript. Written in Damascus in 952–953 CE, concerns Hindu numerals. Read the primary sources and you realize Euclid is a giant lie.

Incredible. Abundant.

But both sides agree that higher prices should be paid to the middlemen!

My Costco has bakery section remodeled to sell dosas. The dairy section also dosa batter!

As AI solves many serious unsolved research level problems all using floating point numbers Prof Raju has been proven right!

Look Ma. Chariot !!

Few years ago, people laughed when I mentioned the primary sources in Latin are so damning! Today more people are discovering.

Euclid was fake.

Sooner or later, everyone will understand Euclid was fake figure created to hide the theft. I have already written about this.