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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Leibniz's "Hanging Chain" - Catenary
From: Dale Lichtblau
Date: 2019 Nov 26, 14:19 -0800
From: Dale Lichtblau
Date: 2019 Nov 26, 14:19 -0800
I heard recently that hanging chains (catenary) were once important tools for navigation, once one discovered that logarithms were easily calculated from them. Leibniz gave a compass and straightedge construction of a catenary and explained how a real one could be used for finding logarithms. Does anyone know anything about this?
