Anthemios of Tralles
Tralles was a wealthy city in ancient Greek Ruins of the city are situated on a plateau above the present day Turkish city of Aydin in Asia Minor, which is near to Ephesus.
In 334 BC Tralles was used as a base by Alexander the Great and later it was occupied by the Romans.
After the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD Tralles remained a part of the Byzantine Empire until its destruction in 1282.
Anthemios, Greek architect, geometer, mathematician and physicist, was one of the great son of Tralles and was probably educated in Alexandria.
He is especially famed as architect (with Isodorus of Miletos) of the great Church of Santa Sophia in Istanbul.
This vast building, later a Turkish mosque and now a museum, was built for the Emperor Justinian between 532 and 537 AD.
It was an early and, certainly for many centuries, the largest example of pendentive construction to support a dome.
This form, using the spherical triangles of the pendentives, enabled a circular based dome to be supported safely upon piers that stood in a square plan below.
It gradually replaced the earlier squinch type of structure, though both forms of design stem from Middle Eastern origins.
At Santa Sophia the dome rises to 180ft (55m) above floor level and has a diameter of over 100 ft (30m). Together with Isodorus, Anthemios also worked upon the Church of the Holy Apostles in Istanbul.
He was a competent mathematician is evident from a fragment of a work of his On burning-mirrors. The first portion of the fragment gives a solution of the problem, ‘To contrive that a ray of the sun (admitted through a small hole or window) shall fall at a given point without moving away at any hour or season.’
This effected by constructing an ellipsoidal mirror, one focus of which is at the point where the ray of the sum is admitted, and the other at the point to which the ray is required to be reflected at all time. An interesting feature of the construction and proof is that Anthemios uses the well known method of drawing an ellipse by means of a string stretched tight round two pins fixed at the foci and a pencil moving round inside the string in such way as to keep the string always taut.
Anthemios of Tralles
