Trisecting an Angle with a Limaçon
Initializing live version

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
The graph of a limaçon in polar coordinates is ; it can be constructed geometrically. Let
be a ray with polar angle
. Produce this line and determine point the
so that
. Then
.
Contributed by: Izidor Hafner (September 2012)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
Isaac Newton used a limaçon to trisect an angle.
Reference
[1] T. Iwamoto. "Trisection Using Special Curves." (Nov 22, 2006) www.takayaiwamoto.com/Greek_Math/Trisect/Special_Curves/Special_Curves_Tri.html.
Permanent Citation