One of the largest issues in ancient mathematics was accuracy—nobody had calculators that went out ten decimal places, and accuracy generally got worse as the numbers got larger. The famous Eratosthenes experiment, that can be found at https://www.famousscientists.org/eratosthenes/, relied on the fact known to Thales and others that a beam of parallels cut by a transverse straight line determines equal measure for the corresponding angles. Given two similar triangles, one with small
One of the largest issues in ancient mathematics was accuracy—nobody had calculators that went out ten decimal places, and accuracy generally got worse as the numbers got larger. The famous Eratosthenes experiment, that can be found at https://www.famousscientists.org/eratosthenes/, relied on the fact known to Thales and others that a beam of parallels cut by a transverse straight line determines equal measure for the corresponding
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