EA bronze mannequin bent forward over her knees to manipulate a compass on the floor in front of her: this is how Isaac Newton sits in the courtyard of the British Library. Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture adheres fairly closely to William Blake’s famous watercolor of Newton decoding nature. But Blake, for his part, takes up an iconographic tradition that goes back a long way. It may be that he was familiar with a high medieval depiction of the biblical God measuring the creation at his feet with a compass. Or the pictorial tradition to which this measuring god also connects, namely that of “Geometria” as one of the seven “liberal arts” established in the Middle Ages. The circle is one of her fixed attributes. She can put it on the floor or on a table, which can sometimes also be interpreted as a sand bowl. Which brings us to a much older, ancient level of preoccupation with circles, lines, figures and also bodies, with the sand or rather dust in which Cicero has his Archimedes drawn; which, however, eighteen centuries later, William Wordsworth will undauntedly pay tribute to in an autobiographical long poem, when it comes to praising “abstract” geometrizing as the liberation of a mind haunted by images.
Benjamin Wardhaugh’s book takes you on such a course across the centuries. It tells of the history of the impact of the most famous geometricizing text – which also contains number theory – the “Elements” by Euclid, which originated around the year 300 BC in Alexandria and whose theorems were still used in entrance examinations at renowned Anglo-Saxon universities at the beginning of the last century find goods. Commented, expanded or deleted in ever new attempts, often mixed with other texts and translated countless times, they have moved people’s minds over the more than two thousand years. Its impact history is difficult to overestimate.
In any case, to present them exhaustively over the centuries would amount to scholarly accounts of ominous proportions. Benjamin Wardhaugh, a British historian with a proven track record in mathematics, therefore chose a different path. He assembles the story as a series of episodes in which the traditions and adaptations are presented. They are arranged in three historical passages, each emphasizing a particular accent of history. First of all, it is about the intricate transmission of an ancient text, the first surviving integral versions of which date from the ninth century. In the second passage, the intellectual and philosophical reception of the “Elements” is in the foreground, in the third, finally, the attempted connection of their abstract intellectual gymnastics with practical problems. Finally, a concluding section appears as a sort of long epilogue, highlighting the handling of the ‘elements’ from the late eighteenth century onwards.
