A Walk 'round Arthur's Seat with John Napier. Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
In rain and mist and snow and ice and also under fine blue skies like these, the walk around Arthur's Seat (251 metres) at Edinburgh is always marvellous. Rugged rocks, grays and reds; mosses, grasses, brooms of various kinds, gorse; clear views of the scenery below of fields and lochs or swirling, occluding mists... Good air... And always food for thought as well.
Abundant associations. These red basalt rocks of the Salisbury Crags (ca. 50 metres high) immediately brought to my mind the famous lines from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and The Death of Saint Narcissus (1911/1915) about coming in to the shadow of the red and grey rock. The apocalyptic of that poetry took me to the last book of the Bible, and this association to the great Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550-1617). The Apocalypse had been a favorite biblical book of his (like it was of Isaac Newton).
But more for me on this walk when asked how far it was to Duddingston's Sheep Heid Inn, was a vague recall that Napier had something to do with the 'trigonometry of navigation'. Indeed! Looking him up on my return from this most pleasant perambulation, I was put again on the right intellectual track. Napier had devised the five-part mnemonic device to solve right spherical triangles. In short: how to compute distances not of 'flat-earth' plane geometry or trigonometry but of the trigonometry of spheres, such as our Earth or the Universe.
Even in the mists, I don't think I could easily get lost here without knowledge of Napier's Rules. But how important they have been to navigators in unknown climes and skies!... those are stories that would keep us here for a long time!
Yes! a pint was had at the Inn, and a bottle of wine later in Town with the Pharmacist from V. Oh! ... and choice Skye oysters.
A Walk 'round Arthur's Seat with John Napier. Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
In rain and mist and snow and ice and also under fine blue skies like these, the walk around Arthur's Seat (251 metres) at Edinburgh is always marvellous. Rugged rocks, grays and reds; mosses, grasses, brooms of various kinds, gorse; clear views of the scenery below of fields and lochs or swirling, occluding mists... Good air... And always food for thought as well.
Abundant associations. These red basalt rocks of the Salisbury Crags (ca. 50 metres high) immediately brought to my mind the famous lines from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and The Death of Saint Narcissus (1911/1915) about coming in to the shadow of the red and grey rock. The apocalyptic of that poetry took me to the last book of the Bible, and this association to the great Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550-1617). The Apocalypse had been a favorite biblical book of his (like it was of Isaac Newton).
But more for me on this walk when asked how far it was to Duddingston's Sheep Heid Inn, was a vague recall that Napier had something to do with the 'trigonometry of navigation'. Indeed! Looking him up on my return from this most pleasant perambulation, I was put again on the right intellectual track. Napier had devised the five-part mnemonic device to solve right spherical triangles. In short: how to compute distances not of 'flat-earth' plane geometry or trigonometry but of the trigonometry of spheres, such as our Earth or the Universe.
Even in the mists, I don't think I could easily get lost here without knowledge of Napier's Rules. But how important they have been to navigators in unknown climes and skies!... those are stories that would keep us here for a long time!
Yes! a pint was had at the Inn, and a bottle of wine later in Town with the Pharmacist from V. Oh! ... and choice Skye oysters.