A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume IDe Morgan, Augustus
Philosophy
A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I
De Morgan, Augustus
Circle-squaring; Perpetual motion; Science -- Miscellanea; Trisection of angle
This is a ridiculous attempt, which defies description, except that it is
all about lunules. Porta was a voluminous writer. His printer announces
fourteen works printed, and four to come, besides thirteen plays printed,
and eleven waiting. His name is, and will be, current in treatises on
physics for more reasons than one.
{69}
CATALDI ON THE QUADRATURE.
Trattato della quadratura del cerchio. Di Pietro Antonio Cataldi.
Bologna, 1612, folio.[94]
Rheticus,[95] Vieta, and Cataldi are the three untiring computers of
Germany, France, and Italy; Napier in Scotland, and Briggs[96] in England,
come just after them. This work claims a place as beginning with the
quadrature of Pellegrino Borello[97] of Reggio, who will have the circle to
be exactly 3 diameters and 69/484 of a diameter. Cataldi, taking Van
Ceulen's approximation, works hard at the finding of integers which nearly
represent the ratio. He had not then the _continued fraction_, a mode of
representation which he gave the next year in his work on the square root.
He has but twenty of Van Ceulen's thirty places, which he takes from
Clavius[98]: and any one might be puzzled to know whence the Italians got
the result; Van Ceulen, in 1612, not having been translated from Dutch. But
Clavius names his comrade Gruenberger, and attributes the approximation to
them {70} jointly; "Lud. a Collen et Chr. Gruenbergerus[99] invenerunt,"
which he had no right to do, unless, to his private knowledge, Gruenberger
had verified Van Ceulen. And Gruenberger only handed over twenty of the
places. But here is one instance, out of many, of the polyglot character of
the Jesuit body, and its advantages in literature.
OF LANSBERGIUS.
Philippi Lausbergii Cyclometriae Novae Libri Duo. Middleburg, 1616,
4to.[100]
This is one of the legitimate quadratures, on which I shall here only
remark that by candlelight it is quadrature under difficulties, for all the
diagrams are in red ink.
A TEXT LEADING TO REMARKS ON PRESTER JOHN.
Recherches Curieuses des Mesures du Monde. By S. C. de V. Paris, 1626,
8vo (pp. 48).[101]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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