Category: 3. Geometry

Ancient architects and surveyors needed to be able to make right angles in the field as needed. The method used by the Egyptians earned them the name “rope pullers” in Greece, apparently because they used ropes to organize their construction instructions. One way they could use rope to form right triangles was to mark a…

The earliest known unambiguous examples of written records from Egypt and Mesopotamia, dating from about 3100 BCE, show that the ancients already had mathematical principles useful for surveying land areas, constructing buildings, and measuring storage vessels. And had started devising techniques. As early as the sixth century BCE, the Greeks gathered and expanded this practical…

Euclidean geometryA number of ancient cultures developed a form of geometry that suited the relationship between length, area, and volume of physical objects. This geometry was codified in Euclid’s Elements around 300 BC based on 10 axioms, or postulates, from which several hundred theorems were proved by deductive logic. Elements epitomized the axial shear mechanism…

Geometry, the branch of mathematics concerned with the shape of individual objects, the spatial relationships between different objects, and the properties of surrounding space. It is one of the oldest branches of mathematics, arising in response to practical problems encountered in surveying, and derives its name from Greek words meaning “land measurement”. Eventually it was…