Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper considers Luigi Cremona’s and Wilhelm Fiedler’s outlook on technical instruction at school and university level, their vision about the educational role of descriptive geometry and its relation to Monge’s original conception. Like Cremona, Fiedler sees a symbiosis between descriptive and projective geometry via the fundamental idea of central projection. The link between projective and descriptive geometry plays a double role: an educational one due to the graphical aspects of the two disciplines and a conceptual one due to the connection of theory to practice.

This book intends to analyse how descriptive geometry spread through general, technical or artistic education, and thus in “polytechnic” schools, in different countries around the world. Our purpose is to go beyond the analysis of the development of the subject in individual countries. We do so by gathering and confronting the local experiences in order to highlight the parallel processes and the connections among them. We also seek to understand how they may have been provided by the circulation between countries and persons or by publications related to our subject.