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 ?
In: Mathematics
Squaring the circle was a problem the Greeks couldn’t solve. The question is how do you make a square and circle with the same area. Obviously you take a circle with an area of radius 1, and a square will with side length sqrt(π) will have the same area.
The problem is you can’t do that with just geometry, and that’s the problem the Greeks couldn’t solve. It becomes rather elementary once you learn algebra, which the Greeks didn’t have.
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