Squaring of the Circle

Letter
a 2
98

Lucas Gauricus of Giffoni, from the Kingdom of Naples, sends greetings to students of mathematics.

A decorative woodcut initial 'C' featuring floral motifs and a central vase or basket of flowers within a square frame.

The squaring of the circle—which Aristotle affirmed to be knowable indeed, though not yet known, in the book titled Categories (in the chapter "On Relation"), in the twenty-fifth chapter of the second book of the Prior Analytics, in the eighth chapter of the first book of the Sophistical Refutations original: "elencorum", as well as in the first book of the Physics (text and commentary 11) and in many other places—you now finally have before you. It was discovered a few centuries ago by Campanus Campanus of Novara (c. 1220–1296), a famous medieval mathematician and astronomer. and Archimedes, handed down most perfectly, and reduced into a very brief compendium.

It is a truly marvelous work, as it was never so well understood in any previous era. For even if Sextus the Pythagorean, Lycomedes, and likewise Boethius Severinus claim to have discovered the squaring of the circleoriginal: "tetragonismum," the process of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle., they can nevertheless be numbered alongside Bryson, Hippocrates, and Antiphon, and the followers of Aristotle; almost no truth concerning so great a matter was able to reach posterity from their sources in any way.

This is true although many things are said to have been written by them—especially by Boethius himself (as he himself boasts)—most copiously. But we must spare the names of such illustrious men. Indeed, it is the later generations who should be blamed, for they cared too negligently for the divine labors of many. If everything that was handed down to written memory by the wisest men of ancient times had been faithfully preserved, surely nothing would remain that would be considered unknown in our own day. But to return to the subject: among the other masters of the mathematical discipline, Campanus and Archime-