Poncelet's porism: a long story of renewed discoveries. II (Q256590)

The article presents the second part of the author's analysis of works considering Poncelet's porism (Poncelet's closure theorem) and related topics, i.e., that a polygon, that is inscribed in one conic section and circumscribes another one, must be part of an infinite family of polygons that are all inscribed in and circumscribe the same two conics. Moreover, every point of the first conic is a vertex of one of the inscribed polygons. Much has already been said about the character, the content, the style and the extent of the publication in the review of the first part [the author, ibid. 70, No. 1, 1--122 (2016; Zbl 1333.01015)]. The author gives a very detailed and quite technical analysis of the research done in the 20th century. This includes the use of the so-called Halphen continued fractions for proving the existence of a Poncelet \(n\)-gon by F. Gerbaldi and also H. Lebesgue's treatment of Cayley's results on Poncelet polygons with geometrical means avoiding the use of the theory of elliptic functions as well as a new proof of Poncelet's theorem by Lebesgue. After referring shortly to further papers on Poncelet's polygons and related subjects by B. Gambier, Th. Chaundy and others, the author discusses J. A. Todd's proof of the theorem, published in 1948 and based on the theory of invariants. Then, he went on to modern developments by Ph. Griffith and J. Harris as well as by C. W. Barth and J. Michel. The first two extended Poncelet's theorem to space and both groups put several results and considerations into the language of modern algebraic geometry. Summarizing his research and pointing out some lines of development the author debates finally the two questions: ``How ideas and methods of earlier authors have influenced later authors and how recent ideas and methods can be legitimately recognized in earlier mathematical works?''.