the necessity to develop and apply geometry to farming produced by the seasonal flooding of the nile found expression in a series of mathematical papyri. the great egyptian mathematician ahmose was responsible for the moscow mathematical papyrus:
moscow mathematical papyrus - courtesy of wikipedia.org
the peter greenaway film ‘the draughtman’s contract‘ depicts the tale of an artist commissioned to produce drawings of a country estate. to aid him in this task the artist, a mr. neville, uses a tool known as ‘alberti’s perspectival window’:
scene from 'the draughtman's contract': courtesy of flickr user *bene*
there are very few cultural universals: symbols, rules and artifacts shared by all civilisations. but some do exist and none so prevalent as the right angle. in the west we owe our knowledge of the right angle to the ancient egyptians, but importantly a number of civilisations discovered or invented the right angle entirely independently of each other: in the indus river valley, the region surrounding the yellow river in present-day china and what we now know of as mexico and peru, as well as various primitive clans. a knowledge of the right angle allowed these various and isolated peoples to develop other important structures such as the square, the cube and the grid; all of which made absolutely key contributions to their continued development.
modernist building taken with fish eye lens: courtesy of flickr user bikini sleepshirt
how did this happen?
last weekend i attended barcamplondon6. generally i like to cover a historical topic at barcamp and i planned to talk about william blake, having spent much of the preceding week reading his biography. i didn’t get enough time to prepare anything though and so had to go back to one of my old presentations as back-up. i let the attendees choose which they’d prefer and they opted for ‘the history of the right angle’, a session i first gave at barcampbrighton3.
masonic symbol showing calipers and set square; courtesy of flickr user tim ellis
i’ve been planning on blogging about this topic for some time and dusting off the old presentation has given me the impetus to do so. the slide format i used won’t transfer well onto the ‘net so i’m going to rewrite it a series of blogposts, starting with this one.