Blue Capriccio

  The Story Behind Raphael’s Masterpiece ‘The School of Athens’ By My Modern Met https://mymodernmet.com/school-of-athens-raphael/ Long before Rafael the hotheaded, red eye mask wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle entertained children onscreen, there was Rafael the esteemed painter who’d won over a cultured crowd of art connoisseurs. By his mid-20s,  Raphael Sanzio  was already a star. At the top of his game, this master of the  Italian Renaissance  had been invited by the pope to live in Rome, where he would spend the rest of his days. Starting in 1509 he began decorating the first of four rooms in the Papal Palace. Collectively, these Raphael Rooms, along with  Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel   exemplify the  High Renaissance fresco  technique. In particular, Raphael’s fresco  The School of Athens  has come to symbolize the marriage of art, philosophy, and science that was a hallmark of the Italian Renaissance. Painted between 1509 ...

  Raphael, School of Athens From Khan Academy The School of Athens represents all the greatest mathematicians, philosophers and scientists from classical antiquity gathered together sharing their ideas and learning from each other. These figures all lived at different times, but here they are gathered together under one roof. Raphael,  School of Athens , 1509-1511, fresco (Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican) The two thinkers in the very center, Aristotle (on the right) and Plato (on the left, pointing up) have been enormously important to Western thinking generally, and in different ways, their different philosophies were incoporated into Christianity. Raphael, detail of Plato and Aristotle,  School of Athens , 1509-1511, fresco (Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican) Plato points up because in his philosophy the changing world that we see around us is just a shadow of a higher, truer reality that is eternal and unchanging (and ...

Euclid and The Pillars of Mathematics Religion and science top the list of the most successful books in history. While the Bible remains in first place, it might be surprising to learn that the second spot is occupied by a treatise written around 300 B.C. by an author we hardly know anything about. Elements, from the Greek mathematician Euclid, has been published more than a thousand times and consists of thirteen volumes on geometry and arithmetic, which compiled three centuries of mathematical thought. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton all built their theories after learning with this textbook, which continues to be relevant today and that for many centuries propelled physics and astronomy—not just mathematics.  Under the reign of Ptolemy I (367 B.C.-283 B.C.), Euclid settled in Alexandria—one of the intellectual centres of the time with its library and its museum—where he founded an important mathematical school and wrote Elements, whose original is not preserved, but of wh...

  Thus was Born the Zero, the Number that Multiplied the Power of Mathematics Until recently, the origin of the zero, one of the greatest inventions of humanity, was not clear. The enigma was unravelled little by little during the twentieth century, and a recent archaeological dating no longer leaves room for doubt— the zero was born in India . It was the Indian sages who first drew a symbol to represent zero, a digit that does not appear in Greek writings or among Roman numerals. That simple symbol granted mathematicians the ability to operate with numbers as large as they wanted. But the great scholars of the  classical period of mathematics in India  went much further. Not only did they use zero as a simple number with which to complete their positional numerical system, but they also converted it into an independent number with its own identity, which they began to use in arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). Supported by this con...