In the previous posts to this series, https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-2/ I set out to articulate a perspective on the opening of Euclid’s Elements as arising by abstraction of forms that arise from sensible perceptions of things experienced in the real world. I aimed to make the case that certain ones of his Definitions and the forms his Postulates […]
Tag: Euclid
Form, Beauty, and Euclid’s Elements (part 2)
In the previous installment https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-1/ (upon which this part depends), I gave what I feel is the correct beginning in how to arrive at and understand basic notions in mathematics. In doing so, I attempted to re-appropriate medieval concepts of matter, form, and abstraction in order to understand what constitutes the objects and subject-matter of […]
Form, Beauty, and Euclid’s Elements (part 1)
I want to begin exploring, or perhaps recovering, a way of understanding the discipline of mathematics as one that integrally involves a perspective of beauty, not a “beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture,” (Bertrand Russell) but a beauty that irradiates from the form of anything that can be understood as having being. […]