Dante’s Underworld

Riccardo Schiavi ()
Additional contact information
Riccardo Schiavi: Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Fisica

A chapter in Imagine Math 6, 2018, pp 291-301 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In writing his wonderful poem, the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri described very precisely the structure of the three worlds visited in his journey. It is sure that the Poet saw, in his mind, concrete shapes and dimensions, and he tried, through his verses, to explain to us that the Hell, the Purgatory and the Heaven are real. Starting from several quantitative information included in the Comedy, it is possible to obtain physical features of the worlds imagined by Dante, such as the depth of the Hell, or the width of the circles, the height of the Purgatory and also the strange shape of the Heaven, impossible to describe with a three-dimensional geometry. Using elementary mathematical relations, I will show that the structure of the three kingdoms is consistent and, finally, I will point out Alighieri’s genius not only in term of poetical ability, but also on a scientific basis.

Date: 2018
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:978-3-319-93949-0_23

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319939490

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-93949-0_23

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 ().