4-3 The Three Famous Problems
The three famous problems are
1 the duplication of the cube, or the problem of constructing the edge of a cube having twice the volume of a given cube.
2 the trisection of an angle, or the problem of dividing a given arbi-trary angle into three equal parts.
3 the quadrature of the circle, or the problem of constructing a square having an area equal to that of a given circle.
The importance of these problems lies in the fact that they cannot be solved, except by approximation, with straightedge and compasses, although these tools successfully serve for the solution of so many other construction problems. The energetic search for solutions to these three problems pro-foundly influenced Greek geometry and led to many fruitful discoveries, such as that of the conic sections, of many cubic and quartic curves, and of several transcendental curves. A much later outgrowth was the development of portions of the theory of equations concerning domains of rationality, algebraic numbers, and group theory. The impossibility of the three con-structions under the self-imposed limitation that only the straightedge and compasses could be used was not established until the nineteenth century, more than 2000 years after the problems were first conceived.