Byrne. Six Books of Euclid

The Library Essay

Proof in Three Colours

In 1847 the Irish engineer Oliver Byrne published an edition of Euclid in which the proofs are carried by diagrams in red, yellow and blue, with words reduced to connective tissue. The idea was pedagogical, that the eye learns geometry faster than the ear, but the result, printed by Chiswick Press for William Pickering, looks startlingly like abstract art made seventy years early.

The book was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, sold poorly, and spent a century as a curiosity before designers and historians recognised what it was. Taschen's facsimile, produced with an essay by Werner Oechslin, restored it to circulation, and it now stands as one of the most admired printed books of its century, a work of mathematics that succeeded in every way except the one intended.