eli5: What does it mean that you can’t “square a circle”? Couldn’t you just take a circle with diameter 2, and then a 2×2 square ?

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eli5: What does it mean that you can’t “square a circle”? Couldn’t you just take a circle with diameter 2, and then a 2×2 square ?

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7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Good explanations have already been given, I just want to introduce you to the other two impossible problems from the ancient Greeks: [doubling the cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubling_the_cube) (given a cube, make another cube of double the volume), and [trisecting an angle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_trisection) (given any angle, divide it in three equal angles.) All of them equally impossible, but squaring the circle has a lot more popular appeal.

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