November 25, 2003
Is that still true?
When I was in high school, when they were teaching us all those fundamental geometry things using a compass and straightedge -- like bisecting a line and finding the center of a circle -- they taught us that you can't trisect an angle. They said great minds had thought about it for a long time and concluded that it was impossible with just those simple tools.
I've been thinking about this lately (I have no idea why) and it occurs to me that it MUST be possible, cause nature can do it. Nature does it when it makes a snowflake. Half of the flake is evenly divided into three.
So if it can be done by nature, then doesn't that mean it must be possible? We just haven't figured it out. Or so it seems so to me.
I was gonna do a "when you were in high school, Archimedes was just inventing the compass" but then I remembered I went to high school the same time as you did, and the joke wasn't funny anymore.
Kinda like when Scotty Ducott called his brother Ricky a "son of a bitch".