Related papers: Huygens and $\pi$
We review and comment on some works of Euler and his followers on spherical geometry. We start by presenting some memoirs of Euler on spherical trigonometry. We comment on Euler's use of the methods of the calculus of variations in…
For a long time it has been known that in the 16th century the Swiss mathematician Jost B\"urgi found a new method for calculating sines, but no information about the details has been available. Recently a manuscript written by B\"urgi…
We provide an historical account of equivalent conditions for the Riemann Hypothesis arising from the work of Ramanujan and, later, Guy Robin on generalized highly composite numbers. The first part of the paper is on the mathematical…
Egyptologists and historians of mathematics around 1930 did an admirable job in showing that problem 14 of the newly discovered Moscow Papyrus from around 1850 BCE amounts to a general and exact calculation of the volume of a truncated…
A well-known object in classical Euclidean geometry is the circumcenter of a triangle, i.e., the point that is equidistant from all vertices. The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic study of the circumcenter of sets containing…
Annotated parallel text in Latin and English of the classic paper of Adam Adamandy Kocha\'nski "Observationes Cyclometricae", published in Acta Eruditorum 4:394--398 (1685), in which he presented approximate geometric method of…
The construction of the COMBINATORIAL data for a surface with n vertices of maximal genus is a classical problem: The maximal genus g=[(n-3)(n-4)/12] was achieved in the famous ``Map Color Theorem'' by Ringel et al. (1968). We present the…
Jean Deshayes, a teacher of mathematics in his native France, single-handedly put Qu\'ebec on the map, literally. An accomplished astronomer, he used the lunar eclipse of 10--11 December 1685 to determine the settlement's longitude to…
One of the greatest discoveries of modern times is that of the expanding Universe, almost invariably attributed to Hubble (1929). What is not widely known is that the original treatise by Lemaitre (1927) contained a rich fusion of both…
Richard Guy asked the following question: can we find a triangle with rational sides, medians, and area? Such a triangle is called a \emph{perfect triangle} and no example has been found to date. It is widely believed that such a triangle…
The notion of maximal-spacing in several dimensions was introduced and studied by Deheuvels (1983) for data uniformly distributed on the unit cube. Later on, Janson (1987) extended the results to data uniformly distributed on any bounded…
Unusual features of water waves that Galileo described in a letter to Cardinal Orsini in 1616 are revisited from the perspectives of singular optics and geometric analysis.
It is well known that several classical geometry problems (e.g., angle trisection) are unsolvable by compass and straightedge constructions. But what kind of object is proven to be non-existing by usual arguments? These arguments refer to…
The Jesuit scientist Christopher Clavius (1538-1612) has been the most influential teacher of the renaissance. His contributions to algebra, geometry, astronomy and cartography are enormous. He paved the way, with his texts and his teaching…
When identifying instruments that have had great influence on the history of physics, none comes to mind more quickly than the pendulum. Though 'birthed' by Galileo in the 16th century, and in some respects nearly 'dead' by the middle of…
Let $F$ be a non-archimedean local field, of characteristic 0. Let $V$ be a finite dimensional vector space over $F$ and $q$ be a non-degenerate quadratic form on $V$. Denote $G$ the special orthogonal group of $(V,q)$. Let $W$ a…
Squaring the circle is impossible, but it can be squared approximately. Ramanujan gave a construction correct to eight decimal places. In his book Mathographics, Dixon gave constructions correct to three decimal places. In this article, we…
In 1946, Magnus presented an addition theorem for the confluent hypergeometric function of the second kind $U$ with argument $x+y$ expressed as an integral of a product of two $U$'s, one with argument $x$ and another with argument $y$. We…
In this paper, we reconstruct Euclid's theory of similar triangles, as developed in Book VI of the \textit{Elements}, along with its 20th-century counterparts, formulated within the systems of Hilbert, Birkhoff, Borsuk and Szmielew, Millman…
This article describes the main mathematical researches performed, in England and in the Continent between 1742-1827, on the subject of hyperbola rectification, thereby adding some of our contributions. We start with the Maclaurin…