Johann Bernoulli and the cycloid: a theorem for posterity (Q679673)

The authors give a well-illustrated mathematical and historical survey of Johann Bernoulli's work on the cycloid. The cycloid was a staple example in the early calculus, with Bernoulli and others finding its tangent, area, arc length, radius of curvature, and caustic. It also had striking physical applications as the solution to the brachistochrone (fastest decent) and isochrone (pendulum clock) problems. A less well-known problem was that of finding segments of the cycloid with ``squarable'' area (meaning areas that can be expressed without reference to circle measurements, or, in modern terms, trigonometric functions and pi). Some such exceptional cycloid segments had been found by Huygens and Leibniz, but Johann Bernoulli found new classes of them and entered a competitive exchange with his brother Jakob about them. Hunting for squarable cycloid segments analytically, as the Bernoullis did, turns out to involve what is today known as Chebyshev polynomials. It seems that Johann Bernoulli counted his work on squarable cycloid segments among his finest achievements, judging by the fact that a figure related to this features prominently on the frontispiece and title page of his \textit{Opera omnia}.