August 20, 2018 Monday
Bedtime Story
Brook Taylor, Joshua Kirby and Ibn al-Haytham
It was the English mathematician Brook
Taylor who is best known for Taylor’s theorem (hard to explain) and Taylor
series who in 1715 wrote the first book in English language on linear
perspective.
The book was titled ‘Linear Perspective:
Or, a New Method of Representing Justly All Manner of Objects as They Appear to
the Eye”.
The term “vanishing point” is first seen in
writing in this book and in it in great detail he described the geometry of
multi-point perspective.
Despite containing great information on the
art of perspective the book never gained popularity and it was left to yet
another Englishman and landscape painter Joshua Kirby to truly get those ideas
to the masses or rather other artists who were keen on learning the art of
perspective drawing.
Perspective paintings also have this
imaginary rectangle which apparently contains all the rays of light coming from
the object of the interest into it and passing through it into the viewer’s
eyes.
This imaginary rectangle forms the picture
plane or the image plane on which everything has to drawn as would be seen if
there was a real window of the same size placed there.
The perspective drawings because of their
small size relative to the actual drawn images have to scaled down and because
the scaling is not even, foreshortening results.
Such a foreshortening converts a circle
into an eclipse and a square into a trapezoid though of course, actual undergo
foreshortenings that can’t be simply defined in terms of geometrical figures.
It is almost certain that many
civilizations before the Europeans knew and used the idea of perspective in
their arts, but would sacrifice it for sake of other priorities.
The great Islamic scholar and mathematician
of the Islamic golden Age Ibn al-Haytham made significant contributions to both
the principles of optics and visual perception.
Using experiments he proved that light rays
travel in straight lines.
Even greater than that, he was the first to
explain that vision is caused by light reflecting from the surface of an object
and then falling upon the eye (in contrast to Euclid and Ptolemy that vision
happened because of eye emitting rays of light to objects seen).
Yet even greater feat than that was that he
got his hands dirty and experimented!
Almost five centuries before the great
minds of Europe began to experiment al-Haytham would tell his pupils that any
hypothesis ought to be backed either by repeatable procedure or by mathematical
calculations.
Along with light he studied the structure
of the eye and investigated the working of the visual system building upon the
works of Ptolemy whose work ‘Optics’ survived for Ibn al-Haytham to study.
He had understood the pinhole mechanism and
then went to write a massive seven-volume treatise the Book of Optics (or Kitab
al-Manazir), almost one thousand years after Ptolemy’s Optics.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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