Subject: Re: [HM] angle names
From: David Fowler (david.fowler@warwick.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 09:41:50 EST
[Thomas L Bartlow]
>
> A colleague in the English Department reports, 'my second-grader
> wants to know what to call angles that are "so obtuse they flop
> over and get acute on the other side."' My hunch is that the
> ancients would not have considered such things to be angles and
> therefore they don't have a common name. Am I right?
>
[Gordon Fisher]
>
> This suggests to me another question. To what extent should the
> ancients be credited with a knowledge or implicit use of linear
> transformations? In the above, one might argue that a rotation
> is being applied. There is, for example, Euclid's notorious proof
> ... And he wasn't at all adverse to translating segments, etc.
Euclid sets up the translation of segments right at the beginning,
Book I, Props 1-3.
I'm reluctant to talk of 'linear transformations'. This is an
importation of today into the past, and it may not stop there.
Seasonal greetings to everyone,
David Fowler
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