today's reading fun

the page i just read, in the book i'm reading for fun this week: (i was just going to quote the last line, but jessica, i bet you especially will appreciate the bit before :-)... and probably a few of you others =P) enjoy:

God the Geometer

The ancients believed that the world was made up of four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Foreshadowing the atomic theory of matter of twentieth-century science, around 350 B.C. the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, in his book Timaeus, theorized that these four elements were all aggregates of tiny solids. As the basic building blocks of all matter, he argued, these four elements must have perfect geometric form, namely the shapes of the five regular solids that so captivated the Greek mathematicians -- the perfectly symmetric tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron.

As the lightest and sharpest of the elements, said Plato, fire must be a tetrahedron. Being the most stable, earth must consist of cubes. Water, because it is the most mobile and fluid, has to be an icosahedron, the solid that rolls most easily. As to air, he observed somewhat mysteriously that "...air is to water as water is to earth," and concluded, even more mysteriously, that air must therefore be an octohedron. Finally, to account for the last regular solid, he proposed that the dodecahedron represented the shape of the entire universe.

Although the particulars of Plato's theory can easily be dismissed as whimsy, the philosophical assumptions behind it are exactly the same as those that drive science today. The universe is constructed in an ordered fashion that can be understood using mathematics. To Plato as to many others, God must surely have been a geometer. Or as the great Italian scientist Galileo Galilei wrote in the seventeenth century, "In order to understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics."

~from The Millenium Problems by Keith Devlin, pages 64-65.

(lara's footnote -- if you don't remember the Platonic solids from pre-calc or something, good moveable pictures here.)