
L'octogone presque magique | Tangente
♦ L'octogone presque magique


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"Pascal's triangle" may have been discovered by Indians more than two thousand years ago. It reached the Arab-Muslim world and China as early as the 11th century. It did not appear in Europe until the 16th century, when Blaise Pascal began to study it rigorously.

A member of a Greek family that emigrated to Sicily after the fall of Constantinople, Francesco Maurolico was born in Messina in 1494 and died there in 1575. He entered the Church at the age of 27, proposed an extension of figurate numbers, and established many of their arithmetic properties.

It is always useful to know how to construct the first constructible regular polygons with straightedge and compass. These procedures directly provide methods for calculating the various lengths in the figure.

A spherical ball is the set of points whose distance from a center is less than a constant. Mathematicians, always seeking to generalize, accept this definition of a ball… in any space equipped with any kind of "distance."