Classical Greek and Roman Architecture: Mathematical Theories and Concepts

Sylvie Duvernoy ()
Additional contact information
Sylvie Duvernoy: Politecnico di Milano

Chapter 41 in Handbook of the Mathematics of the Arts and Sciences, 2021, pp 1163-1180 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In classical antiquity only round numbers — natural integers — were known, and mathematics was very different to the way it is today. But whereas the mathematics of this ancient era was in one sense more basic, it made use of many theoretical concepts and approaches that are no longer familiar to modern scientists. This chapter introduces three mathematical concepts or approaches that provided a foundation for classical Greek and Roman architecture. The first of these, which was equally significant for geometry and arithmetic, is concerned with the figurate representation of quantities. The second is associated with the visual comparison of magnitudes, and the last is the theory of mean proportions.

Keywords: Pythagoras; Euclid; Plato; Mean proportional; Musical proportions; Commensurability; Symmetry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-57072-3_61

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319570723

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-57072-3_61

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().