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Concept
Heptadecagon
Summary
In geometry, a heptadecagon, septadecagon or 17-gon is a seventeen-sided polygon.
A regular heptadecagon is represented by the Schläfli symbol {17}.
As 17 is a Fermat prime, the regular heptadecagon is a constructible polygon (that is, one that can be constructed using a compass and unmarked straightedge): this was shown by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1796 at the age of 19. This proof represented the first progress in regular polygon construction in over 2000 years. Gauss's proof relies firstly on the fact that constructibility is equivalent to expressibility of the trigonometric functions of the common angle in terms of arithmetic operations and square root extractions, and secondly on his proof that this can be done if the odd prime factors of , the number of sides of the regular polygon, are distinct Fermat primes, which are of the form for some nonnegative integer . Constructing a regular heptadecagon thus involves finding the cosine of in terms of square roots. Gauss's book Disquisitiones Arithmeticae gives this (in modern notation) as
Constructions for the regular triangle, pentagon, pentadecagon, and polygons with 2h times as many sides had been given by Euclid, but constructions based on the Fermat primes other than 3 and 5 were unknown to the ancients. (The only known Fermat primes are Fn for n = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. They are 3, 5, 17, 257, and 65537.)
The explicit construction of a heptadecagon was given by Herbert William Richmond in 1893. The following method of construction uses Carlyle circles, as shown below. Based on the construction of the regular 17-gon, one can readily construct n-gons with n being the product of 17 with 3 or 5 (or both) and any power of 2: a regular 51-gon, 85-gon or 255-gon and any regular n-gon with 2h times as many sides.
Another construction of the regular heptadecagon using straightedge and compass is the following:
T. P. Stowell of Rochester, N. Y., responded to Query, by W.E. Heal, Wheeling, Indiana in The Analyst in the year 1874:
"To construct a regular polygon of seventeen sides in a circle.
Official source
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