• A Greek Trajectory

  • Dec 1 2023
  • Length: 33 mins
  • Podcast

  • Summary

  • Ed Sheeran would have been very much at home among the ancient Greeks. Because they, too, were in love with the shape of…everything, actually.

    Shape. And area and volume. And angles. The ancient Greeks were on a quest for precise measurement and perfect shapes. If their architecture is anything to go by, they knew a thing or three about proportion. Using simple tools they measured to precision and constructed to perfection.

    What’s this got to do with math? For the Greeks, numbers were not abstract entities; they were tied to the measurement of geometric properties. If you could draw it, it existed. Probably why, as we discovered in Ep 2, it never occurred to them to think of zero.

    Journey back to the age of Pythagoras with Divakaran and Shraddha in this exciting episode.

    And tell us something: three episodes down, has Shraddha gotten better at math?

    Discover more:

    PDF | Dartmouth University | Greek Mathematical Symbols | https://math.dartmouth.edu/news-resources/computing/resources_general/latex_math_symbols.pdf

    YouTube | Ted-Ed - How many ways are there to prove the Pythagorean theorem? - Betty Fei | https://youtu.be/YompsDlEdtc

    World History Encyclopedia | Article - Greek Mathematics | https://www.worldhistory.org/article/606/greek-mathematics/

    Credits:

    Akshay Ramuhalli, Bijoy Venugopal, Bruce Lee Mani, Narayan Krishnaswamy, Prashant Vasudevan, Sananda Dasgupta, Seema Seth, Shraddha Gautam, Supriya Joshi, and Velu Shankar

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