I really enjoyed this video about how to trisect angles. Trisection of arbitrary angles is impossible using only a straightedge and compass; however, it is possible by carefully folding a piece of paper.
For further reading:
I really enjoyed this video about how to trisect angles. Trisection of arbitrary angles is impossible using only a straightedge and compass; however, it is possible by carefully folding a piece of paper.
For further reading:
I remember running across an angle trisection with compass, straightedge, and two marks in Courant and Robbins’s What Is Mathematics and feeling like I’d been let in on a deep secret of the universe.
Galois Theory by Ian Stewart gives a brilliant breakdown of why this problem is impossible with straight edge and compass, as well as other famous problems such as squaring the circle.