Abstract
According to a story, perhaps apocryphal, the great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) dropped a stone into the canal next to his house, intently observed the circular wavelet that moved out across the water surface, and—like Pythagoras and Plato—intuited that a world of perfection was behind the imperfect visible world and this perfect world was constructed of perfect mathematical and geometric formulations. Of course, the wavelets that Huygens supposedly observed as a boy were never perfectly circular, but his mind held a clear understanding of a perfect circle and it can be argued that, in the spirit of Plato, Huygens spent his life in uncovering the massively important role played by the circle in science.
Published Version
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