Pythagoras Popularizes Geometric Patterns

Invention

Open parchment manuscript with Greek text, extensive marginal notes and geometric diagrams of squares on a triangle’s sides. — Euclid, Elements, Book I, Proposition 47 (the Pythagorean theorem). Ninth-century Greek manuscript, Vatican Library, Vat. gr. 190, folios 38v–39r. A later manuscript witness, not an artifact from Pythagoras’s lifetime. Euclid; manuscript scribe and reproduction photographer unidentified. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 190. Reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Image source.

Pythagoras credited with popularizing geometrical patterns, “the main feature of 1960s computer art. Computer artworks were frequently based on the golden section, Fibonacci numbers, and many other emblematic Pythagorean premises,” according to Grant Taylor.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

Taylor, Grant D. When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art, 76. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

People

Grant Taylor, Pythagoras

Movements

Math Art, aesthetics

Filed under

Ideas: geometry, golden ratio, mathematics, pattern
Technologies: computer art, Fibonacci numbers
People: Grant Taylor, Pythagoras

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