A Peek into the History of Parabolas/Parabolic Shapes

So... how was parabolas first discovered/looked into?

The ‘doubling the cube’ problem is one of the three most famous geometric problems unsolvable by compass and straightedge construction. An ancient Greek mathematician by the name of Menaechmus was known for his discovery of using parabola to solve the problem in the fourth century BC. That marked the start of the work on conic sections.

To find the area enclosed by a parabola and its parabola segment, Archimedes, a Greek Mathematician used the method of exhaustion to compute it. This method was mentioned and discussed in his letter, “The Quadrature of the Parabola”, written to his friend.

A Greek geometer named Apollonius was famous for his writings on the properties of conic sections. The term ‘Parabola’ was named by him.

Pappus, one of the last great Greek mathematicians was the first to ever use the property of the parabola and conic sections in reference to their focus-directrix property.

Galileo, an Italian mathematician and physicist showed how a parabola can represent the path of a projectile motion, as a result of uniform gravitational acceleration.

Before the use of a parabolic reflector to produce images was known due to the invention of the reflecting telescope, this idea was already accepted and advocated. Several mathematicians who proposed designs to create images included René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, and James Gregory. Due to the difficult manufacturing process, Isaac Newton decided to use a spherical mirror instead of a parabolic one to build the very first reflecting telescope.

Today, parabolic mirrors are used in most reflecting telescopes and in satellite dishes and radar receivers.

Isn't it amazing how parabolas have developed over the years? Well, lets find out more about uses of parabolas/parabolic shapes in the next post!