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Person

Pappus of Alexandria

A portrait of a person with long, curly hair and a full beard, wearing a dark blue robe over a white shirt, draped in a red cloth, set against a dark background.

Greek mathematician of the fourth century CE, the last great geometer of antiquity. His Synagoge, a sprawling compendium of classical mathematics, preserves the work of predecessors who would otherwise be lost. The fifth book contains his statement of the honeycomb conjecture: that among equal-area tilings of the plane, the regular hexagon has the least perimeter. He could not prove it.

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