A Brief History of Impossibility
... Descartes The first important step towards proving certain constructions impossible was taken by René Descartes (1596–1650) in his The Geometry (1637). Descartes’s key insight was that by identifying the lengths of line segments with real numbers, one could restate a geometric problem as an algebra ...
... Descartes The first important step towards proving certain constructions impossible was taken by René Descartes (1596–1650) in his The Geometry (1637). Descartes’s key insight was that by identifying the lengths of line segments with real numbers, one could restate a geometric problem as an algebra ...
