De las líneas espirales a la "Piramidal, funesta"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y la matemática post-euclidiana
ISSN: 1475-3839, 1478-3398
Year of publication: 2015
Volume: 92
Issue: 5
Pages: 519-530
Type: Article
More publications in: Bulletin of Hispanic studies ( Liverpool. 2002 )
Abstract
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz maintained through many of her works a sort of manifesto on the ways of learning available to seventeenth-century women with a quasi-rationalist vigour bordering on a pre-Enlightenment interest in scientific discoveries. In the first instance, Sor Juana devoted time to what is now called projective or Eulerian geometry. Furthermore, she demonstrated her knowledge of the golden ratio while observing two girls playing with a spinning top that moved not only in circles but also in spirals. Her observation implicitly established that the golden ratio and its projection into the Fibonacci sequence shapes the world. Through scientific examples she attempted to demonstrate that nature is the daughter of God and an affirmation of scientific intelligence.