The Sand-Reckoner


Book Description

The Sand-Reckoner from author Gillian Bradshaw is a historical account that reimagines the life of one of ancient Greek's greatest minds. The young scholar Archimedes has just had the best three years of his life at Ptolemy's Museum at Alexandria. To be able to talk and think all day, every day, sharing ideas and information with the world's greatest minds, is heaven to Archimedes. But heaven must be forsaken when he learns that his father is ailing, and his home city of Syracuse is at war with the Romans. Reluctant but resigned, Archimedes takes himself home to find a job building catapults as a royal engineer. Though Syracuse is no Alexandria, Archimedes also finds that life at home isn't as boring or confining as he originally thought. He finds fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal-none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Journal of Discourses


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Ariadne's Thread


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"Ariadne's Thread is a mini-encyclopedia of more than a hundred such international oral tales, all present in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. It takes into account writings, including early Jewish and Christian literature, recorded in or translated into Greek or Latin by writers of any nationality. As a result, this book will be invaluable not only to classicists and folklorists but also to a wide range of other readers who are interested in stories and storytelling."--BOOK JACKET.




Biennial Report


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The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde


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New York City was the site of a remarkable cultural and artistic renaissance during the 1950s and '60s. In the first monograph to treat all five major poets of the New York School-John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler-Mark Silverberg examines this rich period of cross-fertilization between the arts. Silverberg uses the term 'neo-avant-garde' to describe New York School Poetry, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Happenings, and other movements intended to revive and revise the achievements of the historical avant-garde, while remaining keenly aware of the new problems facing avant-gardists in the age of late capitalism. Silverberg highlights the family resemblances among the New York School poets, identifying the aesthetic concerns and ideological assumptions they shared with one another and with artists from the visual and performing arts. A unique feature of the book is Silverberg's annotated catalogue of collaborative works by the five poets and other artists. To comprehend the coherence of the New York School, Silverberg demonstrates, one must understand their shared commitment to a reconceptualized idea of the avant-garde specific to the United States in the 1950s and '60s, when the adversary culture of the Beats was being appropriated and repackaged as popular culture. Silverberg's detailed analysis of the strategies the New York School poets used to confront the problem of appropriation tells us much about the politics of taste and gender during the period, and suggests new ways of understanding succeeding generations of artists and poets.




RIBA Journal


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Archytas of Tarentum


Book Description

Archytas of Tarentum is one of the three most important philosophers in the Pythagorean tradition, a prominent mathematician, who gave the first solution to the famous problem of doubling the cube, an important music theorist, and the leader of a powerful Greek city-state. He is famous for sending a trireme to rescue Plato from the clutches of the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius II, in 361 BC. This 2005 study was the first extensive enquiry into Archytas' work in any language. It contains original texts, English translations and a commentary for all the fragments of his writings and for all testimonia concerning his life and work. In addition there are introductory essays on Archytas' life and writings, his philosophy, and the question of authenticity. Carl A. Huffman presents an interpretation of Archytas' significance both for the Pythagorean tradition and also for fourth-century Greek thought, including the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.







Sacred Geometry of the Starcut Diagram


Book Description

• Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of detailed diagrams and technical illustrations exploring the evolution and importance of the starcut diagram • Shows how the starcut diagram underlies the shaman’s dance in China, the Vedic Fire Altar in India, Raphael frescoes, labyrinth designs, the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and the building of ancient cities • Explains how the starcut diagram was used in building and design, how it relates to Pythagoras’s Tetrakys, and how it contains knowledge of the Tree of Life As Malcolm Stewart reveals in this lavishly illustrated study, the simplesquare figure of the Starcut diagram, created only with circles, has extraordinary geometric properties. It allows you to make mathematically exact measurements and build perfectly true level structures without a computer, calculator, slide rule, plumb bob, or laser level. Sharing his extensive research, along with hundreds of detailed diagrams and technical illustrations, the author shows how the Starcut diagram was the key to the building of humanity’s first cities and how it underlies many significant patterns and proportions around the world. Using circles drawn from the vesica piscis, Stewart explains how to create the Starcut diagram and shows how this shape was at the foundation of ancient building and design, illustrating the numerous connections between the diagram and the creation of mandalas and yantras, stained glass windows, architectural ground plans, temples and other sacred buildings, and surveying methods. He also shows how the Starcut diagram reveals ancient geometric knowledge of pi, the Fibonacci sequence, Pythagorean shapes and seals, the golden ratio, the power of 108 and other sacred numbers, and magic squares. Exploring the Starcut diagram’s cosmological and theological implications, Stewart explains how it contains knowledge of the Tree of Life and the Kabbalah. He examines how it relates to the Tetraktys, the key teaching device of Pythagoras, and other cosmograms. Demonstrating the ancient relationships existing between number, geometry, cosmology, and musical harmony, the author shows how the simple shape of the Starcut diagram unifies the many threads of sacred geometry into one beautiful mathematical tapestry.