From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Thu May 06 1999 - 08:06:19 MDT
Spike Jones wrote:
> Billy, do you then suppose the Greeks did not figure out the formula
> for the arches in closed form? They had mathematics. I would be
> disappointed if they did them by eyeball, but now that I think it over
> I suspect you are right. Think Ill go check out that national park in
> Maine. {8-] spikus
AFAIK, the idea of constructing mathematical models of planned buildings
only dates back to the 16th or 17th century. The ancients used geometry and
astronomy to lay out building sites, and the Greeks used geometry to do some
fairly subtle work in planning the appearance of buildings, but there was no
concept of predicting the behavior of a pile of stone. There were just too
many intervening concepts that had yet to be invented.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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