Making Math Beautiful

When we use the words ‘therefore’, ‘truth’, ‘self-evident truths’, and ‘proof’, we are basically channeling Euclid. In ~300 BCE, Euclid wrote the Elements of Geometry that is a compendium of 12 books on geometry. His rigorous mathematical proofs have been the foundation for all mathematics & physics. 23 centuries later, Oliver Bryne rewrote the first 6 books in an effort to make Euclid’s geometry easier to comprehend.

Oliver Bryne named it quite simply as, The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid in Which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols Are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners.

To fully appreciate how Bryne could have saved your math scores in 9th grade, read this, slowly & entirely:

Bryne uses the 4 primary colours and geometric shapes, to tell us everything we need to know about which angles, which sides and which triangles are equal (or not) and why. When you see a theorem set in modernist colour blocks like this, you can’t forget it.

It is noteworthy that Bryne’s style of illustration precedes the modernist art movement across the world. The Bauhaus movement, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and so many more modernists have used this classic combination of solid colours and shapes. One can only wonder if all of these celebrated artists learnt geometry from the same book. Ellsworth Kelly’s large geometric shapes of solid colour displayed at SFMOMA would make Bryne quite proud.

Bryne’s book is out of publication and extremely hard to find. Luckily for us, the University of British Columbia has scanned every page – http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/Euclid/book1/book1.html browse to your heart’s content, and maybe learn some math!

In 2017, a small publisher Kroncker Wallis started a kickstarter campaign to fund the completion and republication of Oliver Bryne’s work. A group of mathematicians & designers came together to illustrate all thirteen books in the style of Byrne’s original book https://www.kroneckerwallis.com/product-category/euclids-elements

The power of great design could not be more evident as it is in Bryne’s work. A subject as loathed as geometry, was made delightful and beautiful even, by deliberate choice of colour, shape and proportion.