Retiring Euclid

It’s been a rough few days. Those Greeks, they’re quite sticky, even after they’re dead, they will still be there to haunt you... Euclid; the father of geometry; the source of my misery (his eulogy, only 2300 years too late).

For the past few days I’ve been dealing with the tedious task of determining the quantity, size and placement of schools in a ‘new town’ (which has the double population density of London! But that is beside the point). The Euclidean Metric is the way to do so.

Now I am not what you would call a mathematical person; I speak five languages, but math is not one of them. I would gladly reason myself to any solution, calculating just tends to seem complicated. Nevertheless, yesterday I finally bent to the needs of the task, and sat myself in front of a spreadsheet (highly confusing), to crunch some numbers. To sum it up, early afternoon, became late evening, became early night… and I was still on a date with Euclid (I told you! Sticky!).

This morning however, instead of using his metric, I got to spend just a few precious moments criticizing his tiresome method (Joy!). All in all, tables, spreadsheets and accompanying explanations and maps; 43 pages (wow?). And now I get to hand it over to someone else and move on to yet another thing I need to study; no more ancient Greeks, I’m retiring Euclid.