Back to the Metriscape

Isaac Newton wrote that “it is the glory of geometry that from those few principles … it is able to produce so many things.” (Principia p. 3.) This laid the groundwork for Newton’s Principia, “an explication of the System of the World” and the sun and planets, including the invention of calculus. But Newton’s system represents an approach far different from the tendency later— a tendency which has become more and more pronounced to this day— to exclude ordinary spacial considerations, intellections of the space around you, from the foundations of our mathematics. There is a pair of proverbs that pertains here that qualifies to be an important part of the life goals of anyone reading this book, “Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge” (Pr. 23:12 NIV), “[G]et wisdom and in all thy getting get understanding” (Pr. 4:12 KJV), because excluded spacial concepts and the words that convey them became missing pieces of knowledge, and the missing pieces became miss