The brotherhood
founded by Pythagoras proved so offensive to the government that it was
dispersed before the death of the master. Pythagoras fled to Megapontum,
a seaport lying to the north of Crotona, and there he died about 501
B.C.[19]
[Illustration: FANCIFUL PORTRAIT OF PYTHAGORAS Calandri's Arithmetic,
1491]
For two centuries after Pythagoras geometry passed through a period of
discovery of propositions. The state of the science may be seen from
the fact that Oenopides of Chios, who flourished about 465 B.C., and who
had studied in Egypt, was celebrated because he showed how to let fall a
perpendicular to a line, and how to make an angle equal to a given
angle. A few years later, about 440 B.C., Hippocrates of Chios wrote the
first Greek textbook on mathematics. He knew that the areas of circles
are proportional to the squares on their radii, but was ignorant of the
fact that equal central angles or equal inscribed angles intercept equal
arcs.
Antiphon and Bryson, two Greek scholars, flourished about 430 B.C. The
former attempted to find the area of a circle by doubling the number of
sides of a regular inscribed polygon, and the latter by doing the same
for both inscribed and circumscribed polygons. They thus approximately
exhausted the area between the polygon and the circle, and hence this
method is known as the method of exhaustions.
About 420 B.C. Hippias of Elis invented a certain curve called the
quadratrix, by means of which he could square the circle and trisect any
angle. This curve cannot be constructed by the unmarked straightedge and
the compasses, and when we say that it is impossible to square the
circle or to trisect any angle, we mean that it is impossible by the
help of these two instruments alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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