Talk:Problem of Apollonius

message: I do happen to have access to Correspondance sur l'Ecole polytechnique. You needn't sell your soul when I've already done so. ;-) The Poncelet solution begins, "Mener un cercle tangent à trois cercles donnés?" But you could probably guess it was something like that. :-) I'll look it over (though I need to do real work for a while longer).
I don't know anything about the circle method myself, but I have access to a large library. If you have any ideas on where I should look, please say. Otherwise I can look randomly. Ozob (talk) 20:17, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You've no idea how happy that makes me; thanks for adding those titles and, more fervently, for trying to understand the Poncelet solution!  I totally empathize; it took me weeks to understand the Gergonne solution. :P Oh, and could you also find the title for the Hachette reference?  I left a note for Reb who added the circle method application; I trust that he's right, though. :) Willow (talk) 12:28, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: ''Correspondance sur l'Ecole polytechnique''

message: To everyone who has contributed, commented on or reviewed this article, congratulations and thank you for all your tremendous work.
Despite all our efforts, however, I think we all know that this article is an FA thanks almost entirely to the efforts of one editor: Willow. I therefore propose we celebrate on her talk page. She has not edited since 1 October, so she may not be able to join us in in actual edits, but her spirit infuses this article and the many editors she has touched, so she won't be far away or far from our thoughts! Geometry guy 19:58, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Congratulations on a well deserved FA! 

message: Problem of Apollonius#Algebraic solutions says: 
:
\left( x_{s} - x_{1} \right)^{2} +
\left( y_{s} - y_{1} \right)^{2} = 
\left( r_{s} - s_{1} r_{2} \right)^{2}
:
\left( x_{s} - x_{2} \right)^{2} +
\left( y_{s} - y_{2} \right)^{2} = 
\left( r_{s} - s_{2} r_{2} \right)^{2}
:
\left( x_{s} - x_{3} \right)^{2} +
\left( y_{s} - y_{3} \right)^{2} = 
\left( r_{s} - s_{3} r_{3} \right)^{2}.
On my Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3 system, purchased from Hewlett-Packard June 2006, the second equation above appears as untranslated computerese instead of an equation. I can "fix" it by changing any of the 2's to another number (which would make the math wrong), but seven 2's in one expression is too many. One would think such a mistake wouldn't be in a featured article, so does the equation look OK on your systems? That is, is it the same as the other 2 equations, with a 2 instead of a 1 or a 3? One way to avoid seven 2's and thus fix it, is to separate the expression into 2 separate expressions, which looks better but still imperfect, like this:
:
\left( x_{s} - x_{1} \right)^{2} +
\left( y_{s} - y_{1} \right)^{2} = 
\left( r_{s} - s_{1} r_{2} \right)^{2}
:
\left( x_{s} - x_{2} \right)^{2} +
\left( y_{s} - y_{2} \right)^{2} = 
::
\left( r_{s} - s_{2} r_{2} \right)^{2}
:
\left( x_{s} - x_{3} \right)^{2} +
\left( y_{s} - y_{3} \right)^{2} = 
\left( r_{s} - s_{3} r_{3} \right)^{2}.
Art LaPella (talk) 02:21, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed. This is a known bug, caused by the server for some reason creating a corrupted image for a specific TeX input. It can be fixed by someone with access to the servers deleting the corrupted image, or by making any change whatsoever to the code. I've made a change that doesn't affect rendering at all. Algebraist 14:41, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misdisplayed equation 

message: If you get to this article via the link on the Main Page it redirects you to this page. The link on the Main Page should be changed. Tis the season to be jolly (talk) 00:23, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirect 

message: As soon as I saw this article on the front page, I added in the accents on the Greek word -- Ancient Greek, if possible, should never be written without accents unless it is in all-caps. So I changed Επαφαι to Ἐπαφαί. Problem is, I'm not an admin, so I can't fix the Today's featured article version, and so far no one has answered my request there. I figure more people read this page, so can someone with the authority please make that change for me? Thanks, Iustinus (talk) 15:47, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Accents on the Greek 

message: What if you have a small circle between two big ones?  Then you can't have a solution that encloses all three while still touching the little one.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.153.216.129 (talk) 16:37, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's mentioned in the section 'number of solutions' and pictured in figure 11. Algebraist 16:56, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's one of the special cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_Apollonius#Number_of_solutions htom (talk) 17:04, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  This is wrong 

message: This is the best treatment of the Problem of Apollonius that I have ever read. "Well Done" to all who've contributed to making such a fine article. htom (talk) 17:04, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Compliments 

message: Reference 48 goes to a broken link.--Ssola (talk) 12:18, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed.--Ssola (talk) 17:23, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Broken link 

message: I'm reading through :es:Problema de Apolonio to check if it's a good article. The article came from here (through an intermediate version in Catalan), and the general quality is excellent. Kudos, by the way. The trouble is, although I am a scientist, I'm not a mathematician; moreover, our Catalan-Spanish translator is a (young!) teenager, and the user that did the English-Catalan translation says he has an en-2 level, plus he is not a mathematician either, more like an "older" teenager. I'm afraid that some content errors might have slipped in, and that should not happen in a good article. If someone that really understands all the math in this article (and reads some Spanish) can give our version a quick look to check for gross factual errors e.g. a wrong step in the solutions of the problem, it would be much appreciated. -- 4lex (talk) 16:52, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Being teenager doesn't discredits my translation, although it might contain errors as the translation of anybody else. In fact, I was already concerned about the correctness of the maths of the article at this age (nowadays I'm studying mathematics at undergraduate level). Furthermore, I contacted with the Catalan Service of Terminology to obtain accurate translations of some terms. The translation of :ca:Problema d'Apol·loni was reviewed by experimented users with a better english level than mine. That's why it achieved the "Featured" (not featrued) status. I'm interested in the gaps you found in the Spanish review, some of which may be easy to correct in the other versions. --Ssola (talk) 20:02, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  from English to Spanish through Catalan, help needed 

message: The article failed eswiki FA status because it was found that references aren't quite good, some differ from text statements, some are false/spurious, some are just copy from book indexes page numbers without really paying attention to where it actually states what's referenced, etc. Magister Mathematicae (talk) 21:50, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Note 

message: In this case I assume there is no Apollonius circle, so that the red and green circle are inside and the black circle is outside of that circle. Am I right? If yes: in which cases of 3 non-overlapping circles there are less than the promised 8 solutions? --RokerHRO (talk) 15:27, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This question is more than a year old, but I want to address it anyway. In the image, the large circle appears to be centered on (17.5, 0) and it has a radius of 16. The other two are unit circles centered on (0, 2) and (0, -2). Eight distinct solutions do exist. No, it is not possible to have the red and green circles on the interior and the black on the exterior, but it is best not to look at them that way. Think of the circle as you would a line. Rather than having an inside and an outside, it simply has two sides. In this case there are two solutions having the black circle on one side and the red and green on the other. These are the approximate center coordinates of those two solutions: (-0.58, 1.05), (-22.99, 13.31) --Geometricks (talk) 14:10, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which cases of CCC have less than 8 solutions? 

message: I find the article a bit confusing, is it about the unique Appolonius problem (the CCC problem or on all Appolonius problems? (the general versions are introduced much to late )
Also could there be sections that give compass-and-straightedge constructions to the problems solvable that way. (are they not all solvable this way?)  WillemienH (talk)   — Preceding undated comment added 08:05, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  can we have a section "straightedge and compass" solutions? 

message: The following solution cannot be included in the article because the source does not meet Wikipedia standards. However, I wondered if it might encourage editors to investigate whether the Problem of Apollonius has ever been solved via vector algebra:
The Problem of Apollonius as an Opportunity to Use Reflections and Rotations to Solve Geometry Problems via Geometric (Clifford) Algebra 
Xxyyzzyyxx (talk) 20:09, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  A solution via Geometric (Clifford) Algebra