ancient city of Alexandria

Geometry Lessons from the Great Library

The Library of Hellenistic Alexandria was the greatest repository of intellectual tradition in the history of the West. Its leading writers and thinkers set geometrical patterns that were followed by philosophers and designers for almost two millennia. We will consider the work of some of the Library’s outstanding geometers such as Euclid, Ptolemy, Eratosthenes, and Hypatia, to reveal the Neoplatonic cosmological geometries that informed their mathematical imaginations. How was the radius of the earth measured with only a stick? How did the Pythagorean Tetracktys transform into the Tree of the Kabbalah? And how did Ptolemy’s instructions for mapmaking lead to the Renaissance rediscovery of perspective drawing?