Pascal's mystic \textit{hexagram}, and a conjectural restoration of his lost treatise on conic sections

DOI10.1007/S00407-020-00251-2MaRDI QIDQ2201992zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors A. Del Centina

Publication date 17 September 2020

Published in Archive for History of Exact Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1007/s00407-020-00251-2

zbMATH Keywords

hexagrammum mysticum organic construction Pappus' problem

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of mathematics in the 17th century (01A45)

Review text

Pascal wrote a treatise on conics that was never published and is now lost. The treatise seems to have used Pascal's ``mystic hexagram theorem as a unifying tool for developing the theory of conics. The author here reconstructs the details of how Pascal might have done this, and situates this reconstruction in the broader history of conics. Pascal was perhaps led to the idea of the mystic hexagram as follows. ``An in-depth analysis of Desargues' Brouillon project convinced Pascal that a direct study of conic sections could be founded on the simple idea that five points (in general position) in a plane, determine a unique conic, and that the condition for a sixth point to lie on that curve gives a relation that may be used as a common definition for all types of conic section. This was the case of the chords theorem in Mydorge (1637), and Desargues' involution theorem in the Brouillon project. But, since the relation is connected with the latter result was too difficult to apply, Pascal sought for a simpler relation that could also be expressed graphically, aiming to apply the method of projection. Thus, seeking for such a condition, Pascal first thought of a circle and six points regularly placed on it, and realized that the three pairs of opposite sides intersect at three collinear points. A natural application of this idea is to translate the hexagram condition on the sixth point into a construction of a conic from five given points. This immediately leads to an ``organic construction of conics in terms of intersections of rotating rulers or angles, as was later developed by Newton and his followers in Britain. As another application of the hexagram, and again in a style similar to what Newton was to do later, ``Pascal knew how to bend the solution of Pappus' celebrated problem to his method for the projective study of conics, and that this problem, that had served as Descartes' main argument to claim the superiority of his analytic geometry, turned out perfectly accessible to the geometrical methods. It was basically an astonishing demonstration of the power, and of the fertility of Pascal's discoveries. Pascal's hexagram theorem is thus a tool for unifying and systematizing the theory of conics on a purely geometrical basis, and for rivaling the power of analytic approaches. These were precisely the key concerns of 19th-century projective geometry, at which time Chasles and others indeed appreciated the potential of Pascal's theorem for such purposes. As the author shows, indications are that Pascal already glimpsed this vision and deliberately pursued it. This suggests that, had Pascal's lost treatise been published, ``it would have changed the history of projective geometry, allowing its birth a century and a half earlier.

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