Q&A w/ Benjamin Wardhaugh
Benjamin Wardhaugh joins us for a brief exchange. He authored Encounters with Euclid: How an Ancient Greek Geometry Text Shaped the World (Book of the Month: August 2021).
Who has influenced you?
I would have to pay tribute to Thomas Heath, the English translator of Euclid’s Elements back in the 1910s. He stood at the end of a long tradition, in the sense of a love for the Euclidean text. He didn’t just like Euclid. He really loved Euclid and his Elements. And you can see that all through his awe-inspiring scholarship that is still impressive to this day.
Do you have a favorite novel?
My favorite novel is probably one that fed into this book. It’s the novel Invisible Cities by the Italian writer Italo Calvino… It’s a set of short stories, and you get about ten stories in, and you realize that each one is a description of Venice. So what you’ve got is a book of descriptions of Venice from different points of view, and that was a point of reference in doing a book like this… How can I tell a lot of stories that are all about the same thing and yet they’re not, they’re all different from each other.
What are you working on today?
My current project is called A History of Counting. Surprise, surprise, it is going to be conceived as a lot of separate, fairly short stories, in which people count from the archaeological past right up to the present day. I am just asking, what is this thing we call counting?
