Kept Alive in Arabic
Archimedes's Regular Heptagon
مسبّع أرشميدس
Drawing a regular heptagon inside a circle cannot be done with ruler and compass alone. Archimedes solved it by a method known only from Thabit ibn Qurra's Arabic translation of his treatise, and Arab geometers, al-Quhi among them, went on to write on it.
- Author
- Archimedes (3rd century BC; translated by Thabit ibn Qurra)
- Field
- Mathematics
- What Arabic kept
- His construction of the heptagon
- Arabic title
- كتاب عمل الدائرة المقسومة بسبعة أقسام متساوية
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Sources
- ابن النديم، الفهرست ٢/٢٦١: الكوهيّ، «رسالة في استخراج الضلع المسبّع في الدائرة»
- MacTutor, «Archimedes»: W. R. Knorr, «On Archimedes' construction of the regular heptagon», Centaurus 32 (1989)
- J. P. Hogendijk, «Greek and Arabic constructions of the regular heptagon», Archive for History of Exact Sciences 30 (1984)
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