The end of this academic year is getting closer and with that also my friendship with an old book.
To build up a friendship with the book “Logometron architecturae militarim Freitagianae” was quiet difficult and challenging for me. The text is written in old German and Latin. It wasn’t easy to understand the content, not to mention to comprehend the mathematical problems. But over time, I understood the structure and the main topics of my friend. The book discusses arithmetical problems, geometrical dimensioning and more fortification problems.
Honestly, our friendship had good and bad moments. The most exciting part oft this experience, was going to the ETH library and getting in physical contact with such an old book. I really had great respect for touching the old parchment and to turn over the pages. It looked slightly fragile. It was impressive to fold up the plan and to see the drawings and the artistically designed letters. I also really enjoyed the visit to Einsiedeln and to become a general idea of such old books and the historical context.
Personally, I missed to learn more about the content and to use it for my studies. At the beginning I really thought I could understand the old German, but I was wrong. The biggest problem was definitely communication. The tasks were quite time-consuming and sometimes I couldn’t really learn a lot from them.
Despite the fact that our friendship wasn’t fully successful I learned how to search for such artifacts. I really appreciated the good organization of the project and the clear instructions. Although I couldn’t profit that much, the concept of this project is very interesting.