
Holiday geometry | Tangente Magazine
Holiday geometry
The holidays are also a chance to uncover the mathematics all around us


The holidays are also a chance to uncover the mathematics all around us


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Equidistance is introduced very early in geometry. Perpendicular and angle bisectors are the simplest examples. Let us go further and consider points equidistant from a line and a circle, from two circles, or even from two more general curves. How far can we take this?

Discovered at Xultún in Guatemala: the signature of the first formally identified Maya mathematician, Sak Tahn Waax, who calculated the cycles of Venus and Mars around 781 CE.

Although Napier introduced them purely as an aid to calculation, logarithms gradually permeated every branch of mathematics. Their fundamental nature emerged particularly clearly through their connections with geometry, trigonometry and the hyperbola.

From yesterday's "touching line" to today's tangent, from "vanishing quantities" to asymptotes, the story has been a long mathematical epic. Here are a few glorious episodes from this geometric quest to "approximate curves with straight lines."
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