Origin of the geometry

The word GEOMETRY comes from the ancient Greek: means "measure of the earth".

The ancestors of the current geometers were the surveyors of ancient Egypt, who had been entrusted with the task of restoring property boundaries, which had been erased by the water due to periodic flooding of the Nile.



It was Egyptian and Babylonian architects who built temples, tombs and pyramids clearly geometric, and the first navigators of the Mediterranean used basic geometric techniques to orient themselves. These civilizations made practical use of numbers without being clear about the concept of number or mathematical theories, and used the practical properties of lines, angles, triangles, circles and other figures without using a detailed mathematical study.



Thales of Miletus, in the sixth century BC, was the one who started Greek geometry as a mathematical discipline, the first mathematical discipline.

The book "The Elements" by Euclid, from 350 a. C. is the first written treatise on Geometry. For Euclid and for many generations of subsequent mathematicians, Geometry was the study of the regular forms that could be observed in the world. Currently, this study is called Euclidean Geometry or Metric Geometry.

Archimedes and Apollonius were also important figures in the Geometry of the ancient world. The first analyzed exhaustively the conic sections, apart from his famous calculation of volumes of revolution figures. Apolonio worked in the resolution of tangencies between circles, as well as in conic and other types of curves.

In the Middle Ages, mathematical science has a boom in the Arab and Hindu world, but is more focused on astronomy. It is not until the Renaissance that the new needs of art and technology push humanists to study geometric properties in order to obtain new instruments to represent reality.

These systems of representation (which make up what we now call descriptive geometry and we will see in other examples of this series) are no more than formal ways of expressing three-dimensional reality in flat documents, and today they are essential methods for transmitting information between the different levels necessary for the execution of any project.