Diocles

Diocles

Born: about 240 BC in Carystus (now Karistos), Euboea (now Evvoia), Greece
Died: about 180 BC

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Diocles was a contemporary of Nicomedes. He studied the cissoid as part of an attempt to duplicate the cube. He also studied the problem of Archimedes to cut a sphere by a plane in such a way that the volumes of the segments shall have a given ratio.

Diocles wrote On burning mirrors which proves the focal property of a parabolic mirror for the first time. Largely ignored by later Greeks it had a large influence on the Arab mathematicians, in particular on al'Haitam and Latin translations from about 1200 of al'Haitam brought the properties of parabolic mirrors discovered by Diocles to the West.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about the Cissoid of Diocles

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. G J Toomer, Diocles On Burning Mirrors, Sources in the History of Mathematics and the Physical Sciences 1 (New York, 1976).
  4. J P Hogendijk, Diocles and the geometry of curved surfaces, Centaurus 28 (1985), 169-184. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996