Parthenon

The Athenian military leader Pericles built the Parthenon to honour the
goddess Athena. The Parthenon was, and still is greatly admired by the
people of Greece.

The involvement of science and technology in the

Parthenon.
The Parthenon is a Doric-style temple, with fluted
baseless columns on a rectangular base. It is
decorated with many art features, including
metopes around the perimeter of the roof, a frieze that
circles the entire building, and sculptures showing
Greek myths on the pediments.

The Parthenon was built with 24 Doric-styled

columns. The Ancient Greeks usually made
columns by stacking several blocks of stone on
top of each other. This made them very stable
during earthquakes because each block could
wobble a bit without making the whole column
fall

Right-angled buildings tend to create an optical illusion that can make

them look top-heavy. To compensate for this effect, the Parthenon's
columns utilise an architectural effect called entasis and get gradually
thinner from the middle up.
Involvement of art in the Parthenon.

It was the largest and most lavish temple the

Greek mainland had ever seen. Throughout the
centuries, the Parthenon withstood earthquakes,
fire, wars, explosions and looting yet remains,
although battered, a powerful symbol of
ancient Greece and Athenian culture.

The Parthenon is the centrepiece of a 5th-

century-BCE building campaign on the Acropolis
in Athens. Constructed during the High Classical
period, it is generally considered to be the
culmination of the development of the Doric order,
the simplest of the three Classical Greek architectural orders.

The temple was richly decorated with

sculptures, designed by the famous artist
Pheidias, which took until 432 BC to
complete. The pediments and metopes
illustrate episodes from Greek myth.
Involvement of Mathematics in the Parthenon.

The façade of the Parthenon is characterized by the use of the golden

ratio, which makes the temple seem perfectly symmetrical. The golden
ratio was used for the construction of columns that were especially
common in the Doric period (Leonardis,
2016).
The ratio of the longer side of the
Parthenon to the shorter side is root-
five to one. The Greeks were captivated
by the square root of 5, which is an
irrational number, not equal to the ratio of
two whole numbers. It is easily
constructed, being the diagonal length for
a rectangle with sides 1 and 2.
.

Phidias widely used the golden ratio in his

works of sculpture. The exterior dimensions of
the Parthenon in Athens, built in about
440BC, form a perfect golden rectangle.

The Greeks supposedly thought that the

golden ratio was special because it
repeatedly appeared in nature, and because
it was pleasing to the eye. The golden ratio was
even said to have been applied to the building of the Parthenon, a temple
dedicated to the goddess Athena, in 447 B.C.E.