Oliver Byrne — The Elements of Euclid

Geometry as pure colour — seventy years before Mondrian.

About the print

In 1847 the Irish mathematician Oliver Byrne did something no one had dared: he taught Euclid without words. Where the ancient proofs leaned on letters and symbols, Byrne used blocks of pure colour — red, blue, yellow and black — so a proof could simply be seen. This is Proposition I.47, the Pythagorean theorem: the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It was a commercial disaster — colour printing ran each page through the press once for every ink — and its unsold stock helped bankrupt the publisher in 1853; a century later Edward Tufte made it a landmark of information design. The colours are Byrne's, not ours. Four flat spot inks, hard edges, no halftones: a page born to be screen-printed. The natural shirt is the paper.

Oliver Byrne · The Elements of Euclid, Proposition I.47 · London, 1847 · Public domain

Care — Machine wash cold, inside out. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the print.

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