Euclidean Geometry in 19th-Century Culture

Description

Convener: Professor Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow) 

Deadline for registration is Monday 28 September.  To register, click on the Online Registration link on the right.  

Conference Summary

Euclidean geometry was a key element of Victorian education, studied not only in the traditional elite institutions but also in Mechanics' Institutes, national schools, and available to auto-didacts via self-help textbooks. As a result of this enormously widely-diffused acquaintance with Euclid, nineteenth-century writers used geometrical terminology and methods for a huge range of purposes.  Just as the Darwinian vocabulary of growth, development and inheritance can be traced in Victorian literature whose thematic concerns are far removed from biology, the Euclidean vocabulary of proof, axiom, demonstration and figure haunts even writing that has nothing to do with mathematics.

The experience of studying geometry was part of the shared knowledge of Victorian culture.  How did this shared knowledge affect the development of Victorian taste, faith, politics and literature?  This interdisciplinary symposium brings together historians of Victorian mathematics, literature, art and architecture to discuss the story of Euclid in the nineteenth century, and to investigate the relationships of geometry and artistic culture from Romanticism to Modernism. Anyone interested in nineteenth-century  literature, science or mathematics is welcome to attend. 

The symposium is funded by the European Research Council.

For administrative enquiries please contact Michelle Maciejewska.