Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)
Born on February 27 1861, at Kraljevec in Hungary, to Austrian parents he spent much of his childhood in Pottschach, Southern Austria. It was at an early age that he discovered a book on geometry and with it a greater understanding of the world around him and the path that he would take.
“In this early relation to geometry I recognized the first beginning of the view of the world and of life that gradually took shape within me.”
The ability of geometry to create a worldview is not a concept unique to Rudolf Steiner. The renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1506) felt that someone who did not master algebra and geometry, and who did not fully understand astronomy and the natural sciences, was not a complete painter. It was also a widely held belief amongst renaissance architects that geometrically precise churches acted as a door to the metaphysical world.
In 1879 Rudolf Steiner entered the polytechnic college in Vienna to study mathematics, chemistry and natural history, during this time he attended many philosophical lectures by Karl Julius Schrober. During this time he became interested in the work of Johann Von Goethe. Goethe was an important element in Steiner’s early attempts to gain insight into the world.