One of the Circle Theorems.
I've just been watching "Art Attack", a program with some
amazing work by Neil Buchanan, which encourages children
to produce pictures, models, and art in all forms.
Not generally my thing, really, but some of his work is
brilliant. And then he did something that really caught
my attention. He described a method to find the centre of
a circle.
Take a circle drawn on a
sheet of paper. Take another piece of paper, and position
one corner on the circle you have. Mark the circle where
the paper crosses it, then join those marks. The line you
get will cut the circle exactly in half. Do it again, and
you have two lines that cross in the exact centre of the
circle. There's a cute animation here:
Fantastic. This is was proved by Thales ("Ta - less") of
Miletus around 2600 years ago. He said that the diameter
of a circle always subtends a right angle from anywhere on
the circumference. And now I've seen it in action on
television.
Maths really is everywhere. Even (especially?!) in art.
Contents
There were no headings
in the main text so there
is no table of contents.
| |
Links on this page
| |
Site hosted by
Colin and
Rachel Wright:
- Maths, Design, Juggling, Computing,
- Embroidery, Proof-reading,
- and other clever stuff.
|
|
Suggest a change ( <--
What does this mean?) /
Send me email
Front Page /
All pages by date /
Site overview /
Top of page
