How does one estimate the size of the Earth? The distance to the Moon? More to the point, how could scientists accomplish these feats at a time when the only available instruments were as simple as those of ancient surgeons: no X-rays, CAT scans or MRIs; just scalpels, spatulas and forceps?
Scientists in the ancient world, and the successors who extended the techniques in the following centuries, did so using nothing but geometrical reasoning and simple computations. Taking a scenic journey through the history of mathematics, Glen Van Brummelen’s Heavenly Mathematics: The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry shows exactly how they did so.
Euclidean geometry is a product of the ancient Greek world that has been studied and held in high esteem ever since. One branch, planar geometry, focuses on flat surfaces and explores the relationships between the sides and the angles of regular triangles. But to understand the cosmos as conceived by the...
Florin Diacu is a professor of mathematics at the University of Victoria and author of The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables under Siege, whose second edition was published in 2011 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
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