How Gauss Constructed the Legendary 17-Gon

本站添加: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]The ancient Greeks were able to construct an equilateral triangle, a square, a regular pentagon, and even up to a regular 15-sided polygon. But, the regular heptadecagon, which is a 17-sided figure, remained a mystery to them. But then, 2,000 years later, 19-year-old Carl Friedrich Gauss produced a construction to this figure.

[00:00:22]But, not only did he come up with a construction to this, he came up with some really cool background theory as to why this process was even doable. He saw that if you have polygons where the number of sides are related to a special kind of number called Fermat primes, then those polygons can be constructed using a compass and straight edge.