If you've clicked around this site, you'll have noticed it doesn't look like a typical tutoring website. Cream paper, black serif type, and bold blocks of red, yellow, and blue standing in for the usual stock photos and gradients. That's not a random choice — it's a direct homage to one of the strangest and most beautiful maths books ever printed: Oliver Byrne's 1847 edition of Euclid's Elements.
Euclid's Elements: the original maths textbook
Around 300 BCE, a mathematician named Euclid working in Alexandria compiled a book called the Elements — thirteen volumes building up geometry and number theory from a small set of definitions, postulates, and common notions. It wasn't the first geometry text, but it was the most rigorously organised, and that made it stick. For roughly two thousand years, the Elements was the way people learned geometry — copied by hand, translated into Arabic and then Latin, and eventually printed and reprinted more times than almost any other book in history.
Every proof in the Elements follows the same pattern: a diagram labelled with letters (A, B, C...), followed by a written argument that refers back to those letters — "since angle ABC equals angle ACB..." and so on. It's precise, but it asks a lot of the reader: you're constantly flicking your eyes between a sentence and a diagram, translating letters into shapes in your head.
A traditional presentation: the diagram only makes sense alongside a paragraph of text referring to A, B, and C.
Oliver Byrne's radical idea
Oliver Byrne was an Irish civil engineer, not a career mathematician, and in 1847 he published an edition of the first six books of the Elements under a title that explained exactly what he was up to: The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid, in Which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols Are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners.
His idea was simple but genuinely radical for the time: instead of labelling a side or an angle with a letter and referring to it in text, why not just colour it? If two sides of a triangle are equal, make them the same colour and put them right next to each other. The proof becomes something you can see directly, rather than something you have to decode. Byrne believed this made the material easier to learn and easier to remember, and — mid-19th-century Victorian confidence being what it was — he was not shy about saying so in his introduction.
Byrne's style: the two equal sides are the same colour, and the two equal base angles are marked with matching wedges. No letters required — the equality is visible.
Printing it was its own feat of engineering. Each page needed a separate pass through the press for the black text and for every colour used, all aligned precisely enough that a red line and a blue line met exactly where they should. It was one of the most technically demanding colour-printing jobs of its era, and it was expensive — only around a thousand copies were made, and the book was a commercial failure in its own time. Byrne never finished illustrating the remaining seven books.
Why it's iconic today
Byrne's Euclid was largely forgotten for over a century, but it's had a serious revival — reprinted in facsimile, digitised and made freely explorable online by projects like the Public Domain Review, and cited by design historians as an uncanny visual ancestor of 20th-century movements like Bauhaus and De Stijl, which wouldn't exist for another eighty-odd years. Nobody in 1847 was trying to invent modernist graphic design; Byrne was just trying to teach geometry better. That the result still looks strikingly contemporary is a large part of why people keep rediscovering it.
It's a rare case of a genuinely good pedagogical idea also being a genuinely good piece of design — form and function solving the same problem. That combination is exactly what I wanted for a maths tutoring site: something that looks distinctive rather than templated, but where the visual language is doing real work rather than just decorating the page. The Pythagorean diagram on the homepage, the tag colours on this notebook, the coloured squares in the logo — all of it is a small, ongoing homage to a Victorian engineer's stubborn belief that colour could teach better than text.