Quadrivium

I was given Quadrivium as a gift for Christmas and have been reading it on and off since then. It illustrates many of the ideas of the four classic liberal arts developed by Euclid, Archimedes, and many others: number, geometry, music, and cosmology. It’s not a particularly deep book, but it covers a wonderful array of topics, and has quite exquisite and detailed illustrations. When reading it, I was struck by the sheer lack of exposure I had had to a lot of these core ideas. Reflecting on my early to middle education, I’ve realized that the way these topics were taught made them boring and tedious, and what’s worse, hid the interconnectedness of many different ideas. I would have loved learning this stuff. It seems we learned more by rote than by building ideas in our heads from the ground up; we learn the steps to compute an angle, but we don’t know why it works, nor do we care. It’s really a shame.