Talk:Gnomon
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I was just wondering why there is no reference here to the fact that the Greek word "gnomon" describes a figure similar to the letter "L" and that is in widespread use throughout the world as a "Carpenter's Square". Essentially the L shape is indicative that the figure adjoins to a square and thus produces the next larger square in a sequence of squares. For example, the gnomon on a square of 1 would be 3, that on a square of 4 would be 5, that on a square of 9 would be 7, and so forth.
- Well I'm not certain I know what you're talking about for the carpentry square, but what I did was look up on Google, and typed in the engine: define:gnomon (search results), and got this definition:
- pronounced NO-mon, a Greek word meaning "the one who knows." The gnomon is the pointer on a sundial, the part of the sundial that "knows" the time. [1]
- That said, a figure similar to the letter L that you mentioned may be Γ, which is uppercase gamma, the Greek counterpart to G. That would be why that L-looking character is used in reference to a gnomon. --D. F. Schmidt (talk) 14:23, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
We may want to include a picture from the Mars rover, seeing as most of those are of gnomons and they're all public domain. I'm not quite sure how to post them here, though.
[edit] Parallelogram
Another definition of gnomon, from www.answers.com:
The geometric figure that remains after a parallelogram has been removed from a similar but larger parallelogram with which it shares a corner.
And this can be extended to mean something you cannot see (the missing part of the parallelogram) but can still guess it's there because of the stuff around it. You see the word used this way in lit-crit.
--If you look up gnomon on Merriam-Webster's online, and click to see the illustration, the relationship between the carpenter's square and the geometric definition of gnomon becomes clear. Perhaps it would be useful to include a similar illustration in the main article. Thanks. (I'm new to this, so please bear with me as I learn the ropes.)--Mise-en-abyme 04:42, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
