Today we will start a series of posts on
compass-and-straightedge construction. Believe it or not, there are a few construction problems that sound simple but it had required more than two thousand years to settle! The most famous ones are the problem of
regular polygon construction and the problem of
angle trisection. These problems were known in ancient times but it was not until the late 18th-19th centuries that mathematicians could finally solve them using the most modern tools of mathematics.
In this first post, we will learn about some
basic compass-and-straightedge constructions. These constructions are assumed as obvious and can be employed in more complex construction problems.
