Science Saturday
TOO MANY ANGLES!!
This dizzying array of geometric angles comes from an 1826 Greek-language edition of Euclid’s Elements, Euclidis Elementa (Ευκλείδης Στοιχεία), published in Berlin, London, and Paris by Treuttel & Würtz in 1826. These fold-out etchings look like star charts gone amok!
Euclid, often referred to as the “Father of Geometry,” was a 4th-century BCE Greek mathematician who was active in Alexandria, Egypt. His Elements, composed in 13 books, is perhaps the most influential Western mathematical treatise. It remained popular and essential through the Classical period and the Middle Ages, and was one of the first mathematical works to be printed during the age of incunabula, with Erhard Ratdolt’s Venetian printing of 1482, the first to solve the problem of printing geometric diagrams. It has been printed and translated innumerable times since, including Oliver Byrne’s famous color edition published in London by William Pickering and printed at the Chiswick Press in 1847, with each of the colors printed from separate plates that had to be expertly registered so that the geometric angles matched exactly.
The first six books of Euclid’s Elements cover plane geometry and the last three cover solid geometry. These plates are illustrations of the postulates and propositions presented in those books.
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