Matila Ghyka

Romanian Naval officer and philosopher

Prince Matila Costiescu Ghyka (; born Matila Costiescu; 13 September 1881 – 14 July 1965), was a Romanian naval officer, novelist, mathematician, historian, philosopher, academic and diplomat. He did not return to Romania after World War II, and was one of the most significant members of the Romanian diaspora. His first name is sometimes written as Matyla.

Ghyka was born in Iași, the former capital of Moldavia, of the Ghica family of boyars. His mother was Maria Ghyljia and his father was Matila Costiecu, a Wallachian officer. In later years he attended the École supérieure d'électricité de Paris, and finally took a doctorate in law at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Ghyka entered the Romanian Navy as a junior officer, serving mainly on the Danube. He was also involved in taking newly constructed river gunboats from the Thames Iron Works to Romania via European waterways. During the First World War he was Romanian Navy liaison officer on the Russian cruiser Rostislav, acting as a shore bombardment director along the Black Sea coast. He had joined the diplomatic service in 1909, being stationed at the Romanian Legations in Rome, Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, Stockholm (as Minister Plenipotentiary) and twice again in London between 1936 1938 and between 1939 and 1940. In 1918, at the Brompton Oratory, he married Eileen O'Conor (1897 1963), daughter of the late Sir Nicholas Roderick O'Conor (d. 1908), the former British Ambassador to Istanbul and Saint Petersburg, and Minna Margaret Hope Scott. Eileen belonged to a junior branch of the Ó Conchobhair Donn, who had anciently been Kings of Connacht. During his first diplomatic assignments in London and Paris, Prince Ghyka was introduced by Paul Morand and Prince Antoine Bibesco to the English and French literary circles. He became a friend of Marcel Proust and a "piéton de Paris" with the poet Léon Paul Fargue. A frequent visitor of Natalie Clifford Barney's literary salon, he also met most of the American "exiled" writers of the 1920s, but his chief interest was always the synthesis of high mathematics and poetry. Their funeral monument was restored in 2010 by art historian Dr Radu Varia.

In around 1900, Ghyka spent a year studying engineering at the École supérieure d'électricité de Paris, Whilst there he developed his own mathematical ideas on the relationship between thermodynamics and living matter, partly under the influence of Gustave Le Bon. Further work was published in French as Essai sur le rythme (1938), Tour d'horizon philosophique (1946) and Philosophie et Mystique du nombre (1952), and in English as The Geometry of Art and Life (1946). Around 1945 Ghyka was offered a visiting Professorship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles because the President of the university had read Esthétique des proportions, and this was followed in 1947 by a job in the Art Department of Mary Washington College, where he taught his personal aesthetic theories for three years. In 1950 he returned to his wife at their family home in Dublin and his Practical Handbook of Geometry and Design was published in 1952. Salvador Dalí possessed two copy of Ghyka's books which was read by theatre director Peter Brook, who was profoundly influenced by Ghyka's ideas on the mathematical relationships between classical art and the human body. The only monograph on his life and work appeared in Romanian.

Contes marécageux; unpublished juvenilia c1900.