THE MEASURE OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAUTY OF MEASURE

The intersection of ancient art and mathematics was explored in a pair of courses taught together in a First Year Program at Randolph-Macon College. While the art history was a standard survey from Paleolithic to Renaissance, the focus was on the co-development of art and mathematics as indicators of cultural identity and achievement. Topics such as the understanding of canons and metrological systems were explored in conjunction with the rise of numerical systems, the functional applications of geometry and the ancient understanding of rational (commensurate) and irrational (incommensurate) numbers such as pi and phi.