The mathematics of sundials US Department of （日晷的数学我们部门）.pdf

The mathematics of sundials Jill Vincent University of Melbourne jlvinc@.au As early as 3500 years ago, shadows of sticks were used as a primitive instrument for indicating the passage of time through the day. The stick came to be called a “gnomon” or “one who knows.” Early Babylonian obelisks were designed to determine noon. The development of trigonometry by Greek mathematicians meant that hour lines could be determined arithmetically rather than by geometry, leading to more sophisticated sundials. In the first century CE, the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius described several types of sundials in his De Architectura (Lennox-Boyd, 2006, p. 32), including hemispherical, conical and planar dials. Sundials are often constructed to commemorate special events, for example, the Bicentennial Park sundial in Sydney. The many common designs of sundials, such as vertical, horizontal and analemmatic dials, can all be derived by projections of the basic equatorial dial (Lennox-Boyd, 2006). In this article I show how trigonometry can be used to calculate the positions of the hour lines for vertical and horizontal sundials, with a particular focus on the mathematics underlying a recently-constructed unique horizontal sundial at Piazza Italia in Melbourne. The words “vertical” and “horizontal” are used in their normal sense, that is, in the direction of gravity and at right angles to this. A u