The Geometry of Yesterday and Today

Abstract

The Roman Empire had become the carrier of a common civilization of philosophy, learning and mathematics throughout “The Known World”, the The Oikumene. Strangely, the Romans themselves were not particularly interested in it. It has been said that the only contribution the Romans ever made to mathematics is due to Cicero, when he rediscovered Archimedes’ grave. But the fall of the Roman Empire marks the end of this common civilization, at least as a web encompassing the entire “known world”. When the Roman Empire ceased to exist, this cultural web shrunk, and went into a kind of hibernation. In Constantinople, among the Arabs with the Caliphs at Baghdad and elsewhere, and to some extent on Sicily the seeds of culture and learning were preserved, as well as among individual thinkers, many of them monks in the monasteries, within the Christian Church.