Albrecht Dürer’s Heptagon
I first came across Albrecht Dürer, an artist from the 15th and 16th centuries, while looking into pentaflakes a little while back. In the comments section of the pentaflake post someone pointed me to a wonderful picture of a Rhino drawn by Dürer.
What makes this picture particularly amazing to me is that Dürer had never even seen a Rhino when he produced it. Well, thanks to the Wolfram Demonstrations project, Dürer has made another appearance in my consciousness. It turns out that he laid out a recipe for producing a heptagon using nothing more than a straight-edge and a compass and Ralf Schaper has brought this bang up to date by showing all of the steps in a Wolfram Demonstration.
I wonder what other mathematics Dürer had a hand in?
He has a pretty famous magic square. It is in the top right of ‘Melencolia I’.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DuerersMagicSquare.html
Thanks for that – The Mathworld link you gave me also mentions Dürer’s Solid which is depicted in the same picture as the magic square.