This story was originally published in our Jan/Feb 2023 issue as "A New Solution to an “Impossible” Math Problem." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
Geometry students are taught that squaring the circle — using a compass and straightedge to draw a square with the same area as a given circle — is impossible. But in February 2022, a trio of mathematicians who couldn’t resist an impossible challenge presented the closest solution yet for the problem.
Squaring the circle has a history of failed attempts dating back at least to the ancient Greeks. And in 1882, French mathematician Carl Louis Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that pi is transcendental, which means, among other things, that it’s impossible to draw a line of that length. Since the area of a circle depends on pi and the area of a square doesn’t, a solution was provably impossible.
But ...
