Ben G's Math History Blog

From my reading, Edna St. Vincent Millay seems to be endorsing a Platonic view of beauty; that is, she seems to be endorsing beauty as an unchanging, timeless abstract ideal which real, concrete things can approximate but never fully attain. The fact that she capitalizes Beauty is one suggesting that she views it as a Platonic Form, but for me the stronger evidence comes from her use of the metaphor of light and luminosity. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the sun represents the truest things, namely the Forms. St. Vincent Millay speaks of “light anatomized”, which here I interpret to mean that Euclid has perceived the true Form of Beauty, and ‘anatomized’ it by producing his Elements and the definitions, proofs, and propositions contained therein. St. Vincent Millay also speaks of how “heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air”, which again can be interpreted as a reference to those people who are chained in Plato’s cave (and hence stuck in ignorance about the true natu...

     The first think I noticed when watching the Dancing Euclidean Proofs video and reading the paper was my resistance to the arguments made therein. As I continued to read the paper, I also tried to consider where this resistance came from, and whether and to what extent it was warranted.       I think that part of my resistance comes from my long exposure to mathematics as it is currently done, and I think this impacted my reaction towards the video and article in two ways. First, culturally, I was very accustom to mathematics done the ‘traditional way’, with written or visual, but atemporal, representations. Because I am so accustom to the traditional way of understanding and of doing mathematics, I found myself resisting the idea that ‘dancing mathematics’ could be edifying, even in the face of evidence given in the paper that multi-sensory learning helps students to better internalize and understand mathematics.       The seco...