x
novaghost
The ancients
Tags: math ancient
The ancient mathamaticians and phliosophers certainly had a interesting flair for the dramatic, but I have been interested in some of their ideas about math and certain ideas relating math and the physical world.  For instance some of their best know ideas that they explored was the golden ratio and pi .  The golden ratio  was used in much in the arcitecture and art of the ancinet greeks.  They had a facination with the number 1 and attribute its meaning as unity or a better way of saying it would be a "unified reality".  That ultimate beauty and harmaony arrises from symetric from that comes in unity or the number 1.  Often there is the idea that we live in a imperfect "shadow" world of the true one (posed by Socrates) as something like the golden mean.  Where the sum of a line in a specific ratio is to the larger section what the large section is to (in ratio) the smaller section. This is a interesting fact (a mathmatical constant) that many of the ancients belived gave a perception of beauty through perfect balance to the eye (as nature seems to have the same ratio).  And as many people know the sum of the angles of a triangle will always add up to 180, but the queston is not that they do but why do they?   Can this say something about the reality we share?  The ancients spend much of their lives trying to figure out these same questons.  And I belive that they may have stumbled onto something. 
 
Calendar

November 2009
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930

November 2008
1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30


Recent Visitors

May 2nd
Andreux

April 29th
google

April 28th
google

April 22nd
google

April 19th
google

April 8th
google

April 3rd
google

March 28th
google

March 26th
google

March 23rd
google

March 12th
google

March 8th
google

March 4th
google

March 1st
google