Menaechmus

Greek mathematician

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History

Menaechmus (born c. 380 bc, Alopeconnesus, Asia Minor [now Turkey]—died c. 320, Cyzicus? [modern Kapidaği Yarimadasi, Turkey]) was a Greek mathematician and friend of Plato who is credited with discovering the conic sections.

Menaechmus’s credit for discovering that the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are sections of a cone—produced by the intersection of a plane with the surface of a cone—derives from an epigram of Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276–194 bc) that refers to cutting the cone “in the triads of Menaechmus.” Eutocius of Ascalon (fl. ad 520) recounts two of Menaechmus’s solutions to the problem of constructing a cube with double the volume of a given cube of side a. Menaechmus’s solutions use properties of the parabola and hyperbola to produce line segments x and y such that the following continued proportion holds: a:x = x:y = y:2a. (Roughly 100 years earlier, Hippocrates of Chios reduced the problem of “doubling the cube” of side a to finding x and y that satisfy this continued proportion.)

According to the philosopher Proclus (c. 410–485), Menaechmus’s brother Dinostratus gained fame as a mathematician for discovering how the trisectrix, a curve first invented for trisecting the angle, could be used to construct a square equal in area to a given circle.