Monthly Archives: February 2026

February 15, 2026 · 11:40 pm

St. John’s College Great Books Reading List, the Western canon

I first came across St. John’s College Great Books program reading a post from Farnam Street.

St. John’s College is the third oldest college in the United States, founded in 1696 as King William’s School in Maryland.

In 1937 Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan implemented their big idea, the New Program, which the college still follows today.

At the heart of St. John’s is a liberal arts curriculum focused on reading and discussing many of the greatest books and most important questions in history. This is perhaps the most distinctive undergraduate curriculum of any college in America.

The program can be consulted on their website and it’s subject to some changes (mostly in the elective books which count with some more recent ones). The version I use is this one from some years ago:

St. John’s College Great Books Reading List.

As you can see, the undergraduate program reading list follows some chronological order in the selection of its books for the different years; Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior. In all, the program requires reading over 160 great books in the curriculum and over 20 elective ones.

Scott Buchanan, an American philosopher and educator, met Mortimer J. Adler and Richard McKeon while working at the People’s Institute in New York in the 1920s. There they conceived the idea of setting up this kind of Great Books curriculum, which they pursued with different degrees of success in different institutions. Buchanan tried it at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago and finally succeeded at St. John’s College. Adler worked on such an initiative together with Buchanan and Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago.

Adler and Hutchins later worked to launch the Great Books of the Western World book series, originally published in 1952 by the Encyclopædia Britannica, with 52 volumes in the first edition and 60 in the 1990 edition. This collection eventually sold a million copies. In the presentation of the first edition, Hutchins said:

“This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.“

The Great Books of the Western World (2nd edition, 1990) in 60 volumes. Credit: Rdsmith4.

Blog visits’ origin in 2025

This is a quick post to share the map below, in which the intensity of the color for each country represents this blog’s views in 2025.

Readers’ origin map provided by WordPress.

The blog received in 2025 over 20,800 views. The top 10 countries by the number of views were:

United States, 40.3%
Spain, 11.6%
United Kingdom, 8.5%
France, 6.5%
China, 2.7%
Canada, 2.6%
Germany, 2.3%
Singapore, 1.9%
India, 1.6%
Netherlands, 1.5%

The views from those countries make up for 79.4% of the total traffic.

The last time I made a similar check was in 2012, then the top 10 countries were: USA, Spain, UK, France, Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Ireland and India. The main changes since then have been the inclusion of China and Singapore in the 2025 top 10 (Australia and Ireland ranked 11th and 13th).

Escher in the Palace museum (The Hague)

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made several works inspired by mathematics. During most of his life he was neglected but in the last decades he has become a popular artist.

I first came across his work in high school, in art class (in then 1⁰ BUP grade in Spain (~1994-95), equivalent to grade 9). The teacher shared with us some of Escher’s lithographs, among them the Möbius strip.

Fast forward to my university time, where in the second year (2000-01) we had a mathematics teacher, Bartolo Luque, who shared some other works from Escher, including his tessellations.

Years later, this teacher, Luque, published a book on complex numbers (“Números complejos“, which I read in 2023) in which among other curiosities he shared how two Dutch mathematicians, Bart de Smit and Hendrik Lenstra, had approached yet another work by Escher, the Print gallery (Prentententoonstelling), using complex numbers analysis. Departing from complex variables, they applied 3 consecutive transformations: a logarithm (transforming the complex surface, except the origin, into a band), then a rotation and a dilatation, and finally an exponential function. You can find below the description of the steps from the book (in Spanish) and an article about this at the University of Leiden website. Further below I include a photo of the painting taken at the museum.

Finally, in 2024 we visited Escher in the Palace museum in The Hague. It was a fantastic experience, that all the family loved. We could see those paintings that I had seen many years ago and let ourselves be captivated by the details of those works and the mental tricks that he prepared.

The palace itself is also a landmark. Built between 1760 and 1764 for Anthony Patras (a States General representative), it was later bought by the Hope family (financers of the European nobility), Napoleon on his travels through the Netherlands stayed there, and in 1896 it was bought by Queen Emma. The palace belonged to the Royal family until 1990 in which they sold it to the municipality of The Hague.

I leave below some other photos of different pieces of art found at the museum.