The notion that beauty is subjective has permeated our culture in such a way that some might think it unreasonable to speak of Beauty "herself-. I, however, cannot help but pay heed to the words that a Mantinean woman spoke to Socrates in his youth: "It is at this place in life, in beholding the beautiful itself, my dear Socrates, that it is worth living, if "for a human being "it is [worth living] at any place."" .
Images of beauty abound in the world that surrounds us. Contemplating the colors of a picturesque fall afternoon, I'm reminded of the scenic sunsets behind the Agua Volcano in Guatemala that I saw as a child, and hearing a jazz ballad sung in Ella Fitzgerald's charming voice takes me back to the apartment where I flipped through pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's skillfully designed buildings and discussed them with an attractive lover. The diversity of Beauty's incarnations is reflected in the many adjectives that can be ascribed to the things where she is present, yet there seems to be something common to them. From the lines of the sunset and the almost perfectly triangular shape of the volcano to the carefully studied proportions of architectural designs and the sharply defined muscles of an athletic man, we see the very elements of the art that measures the world that I spoke of. This art is geometry "the measuring of Earth. By practicing it we will be more adept to search for a way to get through the labyrinth of questions that we will find on our journey to that place where life is worth living.
The tools to understand the science of measuring the figures, patterns and magnitudes found both in nature and in man's creation were bequeathed to us by another great thinker of antiquity, Euclid of Alexandria. In thirteen books he collected The Elements of geometry, starting from the most basic concepts, "a point is that which has no part- and "a line is breadthless length-.
