Thales of Miletus

Father of Geometry
 Background on Thales
Thales the "father of geometry," was a sort
of Greek Benjamin Franklin.
The known facts of his life are few.
He was a merchant.
He traveled extensively to the older centers of
civilization and learned much on his travels.
He is believed to have been the first to
experiment with electricity, the static kind in a
piece of rubbed amber.
 Background on Thales
Other than a scientist, Thales was well known
as a philosopher.

Plato told a story of Thales gazing at the night

sky, not watching where he walked, and so fell
into a ditch. The servant girl who came to help
him up then said to him "How do you expect to
understand what is going on up in the sky if
you do not even see what is at your feet?"
 How High is the Pyramid?
In the Land of the Nile-so the legend goes-
Thales amazed and frightened his guides
by telling them, as if by magic, the exact
height of the Great Pyramid.
The story is worth reviewing in some
detail. It shows us Thales' new geometry
in action, and enables us to compare it
with the old Egyptian kind.
Naturally, Thales' visit to
Egypt was not complete
without a sightseeing trip
to the desert at Giza, to
see the three pyramids
and the Sphinx half-buried
in the sand nearby.

In 6oo B.C. the pyramids

were already about 2000
years old.
Thales engaged guides and took a Greek friend along.
When they reached those mighty monuments, the guides
seemed proud to boast that the Egyptian pyramids had
been standing when the ancestors of the Greeks were
"long-haired barbarians."

Thales stood for a time admiring

the most gigantic of the tombs:
the Great Pyramid of Cheops,
which covers more than twelve
acres! He looked tip the great
slope, rising to a peak against
the cloudless Egyptian sky, and
noticed how the brilliant sunlight
hit directly against one face and
drew a pointed shadow over the
desert sands. Then he asked his
celebrated question
The guides were dumbfounded
and got into a lengthy discussion.
No sightseer had ever asked
them that before.

Visitors were always content with

the dimensions of the pyramid's
square base-252 paces along
each side. Sometimes the Greek
tourists didn't believe that, and
had to pace it off for themselves.
But this one wanted to know
something more: the height.
Nobody knew the height of the Great Pyramid.
Perhaps, long ago, the builders had known. But
by the present dynasty, everyone had forgotten.
And, of course, you couldn't measure
it.
A rope dragged all the way up to the
top (and who was going to risk that?)
would just give the length of the
sloping side.
They couldn't think of any way to find
out the height, short of boring a hole
from the top of the pyramid down to its
base.
But that was impossible!
While the argument went on, Thales and his friend
had been walking around quietly, staying close to
the pyramid's shadow, where it was cool. Suddenly
the Thales hallooed...
"Never mind my question! I know the answer.
The Great Pyramid at Giza rises to a height of
160 paces!"
Terrified, the guides flung themselves on their
faces before Thales, fully convinced that he was a
magician.
 To be sure, Thales did not get the answer by
magic. he simply measured two shadows on the
sand, and then used an abstract rule from his new
kind of geometry.
Where others saw only the men and the structures,
and their shadows in the hot sunlight, Thales saw
abstract right triangles as well! All these triangles
were made the same way: an upright object, a
pointed obelisk or white-clad Egyptian; a slanting
sun ray that hit the top of the object; and the flat
shadow that it cast on the ground.
But Thales saw far more than that. He saw the
motion of the lengthening shadows. Surely others
had seen it too, as they sat waiting, but he saw it
with an "X-ray eye."
 For as Thales watched, he noticed something truly
remarkable. All tile shadows changed together, in
length and direction.

At first, they were all half as long as the objects that

cast them. Later, they were all the same length as the
objects. Later still, the shadows were all twice as long
as the height of the objects.

Probably many men had observed something like that,

over the centuries. But the lonian traveler tried to find a
constant pattern.

He had to prove it was always so, and to find out why.

And he did!
The tale traveled far and wide,
so far and wide that it has
come down to us after 2500
years. And the story has even
more meaning today.

For the Great Pyramid was a

sturdy monument to ancient
practical geometry.
But Thales' shadow-reckoning
of its height was an even more
stalwart monument in the
development of reasoning.