William Scott
(1913-1989)
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William Scott called his 'Poem for Alexander' Towards Euclid; these two great names recall a geometric system reflecting the Hellenic love of beauty, worked out by one of the greatest intellects among the Greeks, in the town that Alexander founded. From ten axioms, absolutes once felt to be self-evident, Euclid arrived by a deductive method at a set of abstract mathematical concepts - pure thought, permanent and ideal, unlike the corruptible objects of this world. As Plato reasoned, art - being concerned with illusion - was falsity. Geometry was truth.