Description On a cloudy day in 1413, a balding young man stood at the entrance to the Cathedral of Florence, facing the ancient Baptistery across the piazza.
He lives in Los Angeles, California..
His writing has appeared in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and his work has been featured in Nature and The Guardian, on NPR, and elsewhere.
He is the author of Infinitesimal, Geometrical Landscapes, and Duel at Dawn.
About the Author Amir Alexander teaches history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Annotation The author offers an eye-opening narrative of how geometric principles fundamentally shaped the world.
Euclid, Alexander shows, made the World as we know it possible.
For who could doubt the right of a ruler or the legitimacy of a government that drew its power from the immutable principles of Euclidean geometry?From the elegant terraces of Versailles to the broad avenues of Washington, DC and on to the boulevards of New Delhi and Manila, the Geometrical vision was carved into the landscape of modernity.
Geometry came to stand for a fixed and unchallengeable universal order, and kings, empire-builders, and even republican revolutionaries would rush to cast their rule as the apex of the Geometrical universe.
In Proof , the award-winning historian Amir Alexander traces the path of the Geometrical vision of the World as it coursed its way from the Renaissance to the present, shaping our societies, our politics, and our ideals.
But on that day, the master craftsman and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi would prove that the World and everything within it was governed by the ancient science of geometry.
Few at the time understood what he was up to; even he barely had an inkling of what was at stake.
As puzzled passers-by looked on, he raised a small painting to his face, then held a mirror in front of the painting.
Description On a cloudy day in 1413, a balding young man stood at the entrance to the Cathedral of Florence, facing the ancient Baptistery across the piazza
