How and when did humans as a species come up with the idea of a straight line? There is no example of this in nature, so did man make up the straight line? And why then?
Answer
This is actually not a question for mathematicians or physicists but for cultural anthropologists (which I am not). But I can immediately think of two things.
When man started developing tools to outwit prey animals, think of arrows and spears, he quickly realized that a nice straight arrow or spear is quite handy.
Secondly, the idea that the straight distance from a point A to a point B gives the shortest displacement also seems very natural to me.
Primitive man did not yet know that this straight line is actually a geodesic on a sphere, and we do not really take this into account now as long as it concerns limited distances.
Sincerely
Jan
Answered by
Jan Van den Bussche
computer science bioinformatics ecology
Agoralaan University Campus Building D BE-3590 Diepenbeek
http://www.uhasselt.be/
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