Tag Archives: polygons

Bhāskara-II’s polygons and an algebraic approximation for sines of pi by x

Unlike the Greeks, the Hindus were not particularly obsessed with constructions involving just a compass and a straightedge. Nevertheless, their pre-modern architecture and yantra-s from the tāntrika tradition indicate that they routinely constructed various regular polygons inscribed in circles. Of … Continue reading

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The Platonic culmination of Euclid and the pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity

Why did great sage Pāṇini compose the Aṣṭādhyāyī? There were probably multiple reasons but often you hear people say that he wanted to give a complete description of the Sanskrit language. That was probably one of his reasons but was … Continue reading

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From Plato to Euler and back

This is primarily meant as an educational handout on some very basic theorems of geometry that one might have studied in school. Some educated adults whom we asked about these had either forgotten them or claimed to have never studied … Continue reading

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Packing constants for polygonal fractal maps

Among the very first programs which we wrote in our childhood was one to generate the famous Sierpinski triangle as an attractor using the “Chaos Game” algorithm of Barnsley. A couple of years later we returned to it generalize it … Continue reading

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The remarkable behavior of a map displaying derived from a simple model for a biological conflict

One of the simplest yet profound mathematical models for biological growth emerged sometime in the middle of the 1800s due to the work of Verhulst. It describes population growth thus: let be the population of the organism at time . … Continue reading

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Constructing a regular heptagon with hyperbola and parabola

There is little doubt that Archimedes was one of the greatest yavana intellectuals. He would also figure in any list of the greatest mathematician-scientists of all times. His work on the construction of a regular heptagon has not survived the … Continue reading

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Polygonal recursion

Also see this

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