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Why Beauty id Truth by Ian Stewart

Decent Essays

Why Beauty is truth: A History of Symmetry by Ian Stewart is in depth on how mathematicians came about symmetry. Instead of coming across symmetry by geometry as someone today might think, Stewart shows how it became an idea by algebra. Most of the book is told in chronological order from the early Egyptians and Babylonians discovery of the quadratic equation and leading up to the impossibility to solve the quintic equation. Through each chapter we see how mathematicians get one step closer to solving the quintic, and their struggles they faced along the way.

Early Equations The earliest record of the quadratic that we know of dates back to the Babylonians, solved on a tablet. Historians and Mathematicians do not have any clue about how the Babylonians came to solve the quadratic, but think that they came across is geometrically. Stewart shows how Euclid’s Elements of Geometry introduced the basic methods for constructing a proof. Included in Elements in Proposition 9 of Book I is how Euclid shows how to bisect an angle with only a compass and a straightedge. Elements did not include information on how to trisect and angle though, which could have been used for the construction of a regular 7-gon. It was Euclid’s Elements that inspired mathematicians to take it one step further and solve the things that Euclid had left out, such as squaring the circle with only a compass and a straightedge. The difficulty of these problems led mathematicians to change the way that they

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