Drawing the line
"Line is the first species of quantity, which has only one dimension, namely length, without any width nor depth, and is nothing else than the flow or run of the point which will leave from its imaginary moving some vestige in length, exempt of any width."
- Pierre Mardele, Lyon, 1645
"Think deeply of simple things."
- Arnold Ross, mathematician
Nazca Lines, Pampa region, Peru, photo by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Ants. Books. Clay. Shirts. Sand. Tape. Text. Canvas. Video. Honey. Textile. Wire.
These are lines. But what is a line? Or, perhaps, more properly put, what is line? Euclid tried to pin it down for future geometers but all they were left with was a
A mark, an edge, a border, a limit, a boundry... A line is an object with infinite directional dimension yet with no width.
“A line is a breadthless length.”
- Euclid, Book 1 of The Elements, Def. 1.2.