Diagrams
Date
20 December 1699
Creator
John Wallis (1616 - 1703, British) , Mathematician
Object type
Archive reference number
Manuscript page number
p3
Material
Dimensions
height (page): 358mm
width (page): 235mm
width (page): 235mm
Subject
Description
Diagrams in a letter from John Wallis dated 20 December 1699 at Oxford to Hans Sloane. Wallis reported the solution proposed by a John Perks, and deemed valid by David Gregory and John Caswell, regarding the 'lunula' of Hippocrates of Chios (5th century BCE). Hippocrates had shown that a moon-shaped area bounded by circular arcs can be expressed rationally by the radii of those arcs. Perks showed that a subsection of this lunula could also be expressed rationally.
Wallis's letter was read at the meeting of the Royal Society on 3 January 1700, and printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 21, no. 259 (1699).
John Perks was a school master at the Old Swynford Hospital, a school in Worcestershire, and was an amateur mathematician (see Olaf Pedersen, 'Master John Perks and his Mechanical Curves', Centaurus, 8 (1963), 1-18).
Wallis's letter was read at the meeting of the Royal Society on 3 January 1700, and printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 21, no. 259 (1699).
John Perks was a school master at the Old Swynford Hospital, a school in Worcestershire, and was an amateur mathematician (see Olaf Pedersen, 'Master John Perks and his Mechanical Curves', Centaurus, 8 (1963), 1-18).
Object history
3 January 1700, 'A letter was read from Dr Wallis to Dr Sloane concerning the Quadrature of the parts of the Lunula Hippocrates Cous [sic], it was desired to be printed in the Transactions' (JBO/10/158).
John Wallis, ‘Concerning the quadrature of the parts of the lunula of Hippocrates chius’, Phil. Trans., vol. 21, no. 259 (December 1699), pp. 411-18 (p. 411).
John Wallis, ‘Concerning the quadrature of the parts of the lunula of Hippocrates chius’, Phil. Trans., vol. 21, no. 259 (December 1699), pp. 411-18 (p. 411).
Related fellows
Hans Sloane (1660 - 1753, Irish) , Physician
Associated place