Timeline for Did ancient mathematicians know Euler's characteristic for convex polyhedra?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| Mar 9, 2020 at 1:56 | comment | added | Nick Matteo | Rubber has been in use for millennia, although it was only arriving in Europe during Euler's lifetime. | |
| Mar 8, 2020 at 22:58 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | @Pietro Maier: I edited and added a reference on a funny example about Euclid's "definition" of polyhedra. | |
| Mar 8, 2020 at 22:54 | history | edited | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 16, 2014 at 22:45 | comment | added | Pietro Majer | So, at least we know that Hellenistic mathematicians did have a various enough class of examples (some of them quite complicated) in order that the problem of looking for a pattern between V,E,F could be considered. | |
| Jan 16, 2014 at 22:39 | comment | added | Pietro Majer | Actually Euclid does have a sort of general definition of polyhedron (Elements, XI) although he immediately focuses on a list of the most common ones: prism, pyramid, cube, etc. Archimedes made an exhaustive study of the semi-regular polyhedra now called after him (in a work that we known by secondary sources), employing certain general operations to build new polyhedra out of polyhedra. | |
| Jan 16, 2014 at 21:18 | history | edited | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 16, 2014 at 20:22 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | The absence of evidence. Yes. It is a subject of discussion, how much of the ancient science works survived. I side with Lucio Russo who thinks that most of it is lost. | |
| Jan 16, 2014 at 16:02 | comment | added | Lee Mosher | I like your rubber story, and particularly your expression of doubt about "arbitrary" polytopes. And yet the absence of evidence is not less wonderful when restricted to, say, the five Platonic solids, or their stellations, or any other of the small number of polytopes that the ancients might have considered. | |
| Jan 16, 2014 at 15:46 | history | answered | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |