AMERICANALMANAC (Charles McAdams) - Oxford mathematician dismantles a 2,000-year-old myth about the Parthenon
An Oxford researcher says the famous curves of the Parthenon were never designed to fool the human eye, and the story that they were rests on zero direct evidence. For more than two millennia, students, tourists, and architecture professors have repeated the same elegant claim: the ancient Greeks built subtle curves into the Parthenon so […] The post Oxford mathematician dismantles a 2,000-year-old myth about the Parthenon appeared first on American Almanac .
An Oxford researcher says the famous curves of the Parthenon were never designed to fool the human eye, and the story that they were rests on zero direct evidence. For more than two millennia, students, tourists, and architecture professors have repeated the same elegant claim: the ancient Greeks built subtle curves into the Parthenon so that its perfectly straight lines would not appear to sag. The idea has shown up in textbooks, documentaries, and guided tours of the Acropolis. Professor Alain Goriely, an Oxford mathematician, now argues in a peer-reviewed study that the whole thing is a myth, and always was. Goriely's paper, titled "The illusion of illusions: there are no optical corrections in the Parthenon," was published in the…Open