The Platonic Culmination of Euclid

8/23/2019 The Platonic culmination of Euclid and the pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity | mAnasa-taraMgiNI
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The Platonic culmination of Euclid and the pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity

Posted on May 5, 2019
Why did great sage Pāṇini compose the Aṣṭādhyāyī? There were probably multiple reasons but often you
hear people say that he wanted to give a complete description of the Sanskrit language. That was probably
one of his reasons but was it the central reason or the most important driver of his endeavor. From his own
language and the evolution of the language to his times we can see that the Vedic register of Sanskrit was
well known but already largely a thing of history in terms of being a spoke language. Yet, Pāṇini devotes an
enormous amount of effort in describing it accurately and it still forms the foundation of our effort to
understand the earliest words of our ārya ancestors. Thus, understanding the Vedic language so that we can
properly understand the religion of our ārya ancestors and perform rituals as enjoined in the śruti was the
major reason for Pāṇini-s effort. This indeed is acknowledged by his great commentator Patañjali. One who
is well-acquainted with the śruti also realizes that the ārya-s conceived this linguistic framework for
understanding the śruti and performing the rituals enjoined by it as having a deeper signi cance — it
offered an means of apprehending the nature of the deva-s and understanding the universe. Hence, the
great Aṅgiras Dirghatamas auccāthya states in the śruti:
ṛco akṣare parame vyoman

yasmin devā adhi viśve niṣeduḥ |
yas tan na veda kim ṛcā kariṣyati
ya it tad vidus ta ime sam āsate || RV1.164.39
In the syllable of the ṛc set in the highest world,

therein all the gods have taken residence,
he who doesn’t know that what can he do with the ṛc?
verily only they who know can sit together [in this ritual session].
It was with such considerations in mind that the sages Pāṇini and Patañjali composed their works. Thus,
their works, which aimed at developing a certain comprehensiveness of the framework from as small as set
of foundational axioms and with as much internal consistency as possible, never lost focus on its
relationship with the “root”, i.e. the śruti.
Just as Pāṇini is for the ārya-s, Euclid is to their yavana cousins. His geometric system was in many ways
parallel to the vyākaraṇa of Pāṇini. Like the work of Pāṇini it served as the framework of knowledge at large
among the yavana-s, but what was the central reason for its composition? In the modern Occident which
considers Euclid as one of the elements of their intellectual undergirding this is either completely ignored
or wrongly stated as being the need to compose a comprehensive secular geometric text. However, we hear
from Euclid’s great commentator, a sage in his own right, Proclus, that the reason was to ultimately develop
a geometric framework to understand the “roots” (rhizomata) of existence. These were rst expounded by
Empedocles in his verse:
And rst the fourfold root of all things hear!–

White gleaming Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus,
And Nestis whose tears bedew mortality.
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Empedocles identi ed the “roots” with the four deities Zeus (the ery element= Skt: agni), Hera (the gaseous
element= Skt:vāyu), Aidoneus (the solid element= Skt: pṛthivī) and Nestis (the liquid element= Skt:ap). One
may compare the initial part of the Empedoclean system with the proto-Sāṃkhya system described in the
upaniṣat of the Taittirīya-s.
Plato, who came after Empedocles, incorporated these “roots” into his theory of knowledge as “stoicheia”,
which literally mean letters of the alphabet. This hints a parallel to the ārya usage that might lurk behind
Plato’s stoicheia because indeed the akṣara-s, the Sanskrit equivalent of stoicheia, are at the foundation of
the Hindu system as encapsulated by Pānini in his Māheśvara-sūtrāṇi. However, the sense in which Plato
constructed his stoicheia was not by using linguistic analogs but by using geometric ones. He chose for this
purpose the only regular solids that can be inscribed in a sphere — i.e the 5 Platonic solids. Plato is said to
have learned of these from his predecessors like Pythagoras and his mathematical interlocutor Theaetetus.
He incorporated them into an elaborate geometric “atomism” wherein the the ery element was the
tetrahedron, the solid element was the cube, the gaseous element was the octahedron, the stuff of the
universe as a whole was the dodecahedron and the liquid element was the icosahedron. However, as his
polyhedral system had 5 solids his system ultimately had to break away from the 4 element system of the old
yavana-s and converge towards the 5 element system of the ārya-s.
Plato’s polyhedra may be seen as “molecules” because beneath them there lay his true atomic entities
namely the and the right triangles (the 3 angles of this triangle are given in degrees).
Two of these combined to give the equilateral triangle and the square which in turn constituted the four
elemental polyhedra (sort of like the dvayāṇu theory of Akṣapāda Gautama). So in a process like the boiling of
water into the gaseous state under the in uence of the re tetrahedron Plato saw the water icosahedron
break down into equilateral triangles and reconstitute gaseous octahedra. In his system the solid cube had
to keep out of these of inter-conversions. Aristotle was uncomfortable with this but the later Platonists
including Proclus saw this a genuine feature of the solid element. Proclus explained it by stating that the
solid element might be subdivided in interaction with the other two but does not ultimately transform.
In any case, for Proclus the foundation of understanding was based in mathematics. Indeed, he says that it
“puri es and elevates the soul even as the goddess Athena dispersed mist obscuring the intellectual light of
understanding.” Hence, it was critical to have a complete theory from few starting axioms to construct the 5
Platonic solids that form the basis of existence. This, he says, is the ultimate objective of Euclid — a complete
theory from axioms to construct the Platonic solids. In support of this understanding one may note that the
key constructions of the Platonic solids come in the last book of the Elements of Euclid. As per Proclus,
Euclid was a Platonist who had studied with associates and students of Plato such as Philippus and
Theaetetus before composing his treatise. Now the tetrahedron and cube are easy to construct from
equilateral triangles and squares. The octahedron is slightly more involved by is also quite easily achieved as
a equilateral bipyramid on a square base. However, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron are much more
of a challenge. It is this context we encounter the “culmination of Euclid” in the form of the famous
pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity of Euclidean geometry. Below we shall journey through this identity,
and note its proof and how it speci es the icosahedron. Once, we have an icosahedron we can construct the
dodecahedron as its dual.
Figure 1
Consider a regular pentagon, hexagon and decagon inscribed within the same circle (Figure 1). Let their
sides be . Then, what is the relationship between their sides? The answer to this is provide by Euclid in
his Elements, Book 13, Proposition 10:
The pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity( ): If an equilateral pentagon is inscribed in a circle, then the

square on the side of the pentagon equals the sum of the squares on the sides of the hexagon and the decagon
inscribed in the same circle.
Figure 2
Alternatively, if the sides of a regular pentagon, hexagon and decagon respectively form the hypotenuse,
greater and smaller legs of a right triangle then their circumcircles are congruent (Figure 2).
Now, the the proof for this as given by Euclid is not entirely obvious and, at least to us, it is unclear if he
even gave a complete proof for it. Nevertheless, we can prove it using all the material he has described up to
that point and the commentary of Proclus. For the proof one needs to rst de ne that special ratio known
as the Golden ratio :
Since this is a quadratic equation it has two roots. We call the larger one of these and by de nition
the smaller one is . Proclus tells us that it was revealed to the Pythagoreans by the Muse goddess
who came to them. He then says that Plato recognized its importance and made conjectures on them which
his mathematician student Eudoxus then proved using geometry. It is evidently this material of Eudoxus that
is presented by Euclid — for example, he provides a means to construct without calling it that in Book 2 of
his Elements. Now this ratio has a special relationship to the isosceles triangle with angles : in such a
triangle the ratio of either of the congruent sides to its base is . This Golden ratio triangle is central to the
proof of the identity.
Figure 3
Figure 3 depicts the construction required for our proof. We observe that the said pentagon of our identity
is in green, the hexagon in blue dotted segments and the decagon in red. The radius of their circumcircle is
the same as the side of the hexagon . From the construction we see two instances of the above-mentioned
Golden ratio triangles: One with sides and another with sides . From those triangles we can
write the below:
If one were to assume the theorem of Brahmagupta or Ptolemaios regarding the diagonals and sides of a
cyclic quadrilaterals one can prove it by an alternative path. We leave this for the geometrically inclined
reader to work out.
Figure 4
The remarkable discovery of the yavana-s was the relationship of this identity to the icosahedron.
Consider the icosahedron in Figure 4. By de nition all edges of the icosahedron are equal and all faces are
equilateral triangles. Now, the edges of the icosahedron are congruent to the sides of the pentagon in the
identity. Thus, if one constructs the circle as in Figure 4 we get the circumcircle as in Figure 3. With
this circle we can construct the sides of the decagon as above, e.g. in Figure 4. Then, the
relationship it has to the icosahedron is that . The 5 faces of an icosahedron each of which
share a common edge constitute a pentagonal pyramid. The height of this pyramid is (Figure 4). Now, by
construction the radius of the circumcircle of the pentagonal bases of such pyramids in the icosahedron is
of length , i.e. the side of the hexagon in the identity (Figure 4; ). Interestingly, if we visualize
the icosahedron as being made up of two pentagonal pyramids stuck to a central band of 10 facets then the
distance between the pentagonal bases of the two pyramids is (Figure 4; ). Thus, the planar
identity is able to describe the icosahedron in 3D space and we can use it to construct this non-obvious
Platonic solid. In order to prove this relationship between the identity and the above landmarks of the
icosahedron we have to effectively prove that (Figure 4). They are right triangles and their
hypotenuse and legs are respectively .
Figure 5
In order to prove that we have rst construct rectangles inside the icosahedron like the one shown in Figure
5. From the above Golden triangle (Figure 3) and its relationship to the pentagon (used in the compass and
straight-edge construction of the pentagon; see this note) we can see that such an internal rectangle of the
icosahedron will be a Golden rectangle, i.e. ratio of its non-equal sides would be .
Figure 6
We then use this rectangle to make an orthographic projection of the icosahedral construction in Figure 4
on to a plane (Figure 6). In the right panel of Figure 6 we see how this Golden rectangle is placed with
respect to key landmarks of the icosahedron. In the left panel we see the actual projection of icosahedral
construction in Figure 4. This preserves the mutual relationships of between 3D construction
and the planar projection. We construct . By examining this gure we observe . Thus,
. From this, one can show that . By the nature of the projection we preserve the
equivalence of the edges of the icosahedron such that . Thus, by Side-Angle-Angle test we can show
Thus, we complete our journey through one of the profound aspects of Euclidean space — a thread passing
through its de ning feature the bhujā-koṭi-karṇa-nyāya, the three regular polygons and the regular
polyhedron, the icosahedron. When we were young, on account of our fascination for viral capsid
structures, we closely studied the geometry of polyhedra by practical means, i.e. making them out of paper.
It was in course of this we learnt of the identity. We were able to practically con rm that for ourselves
based on our models. However, it took us some time before we actually apprehended the proof.
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8/23/2019 The Platonic culmination of Euclid and the pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity | mAnasa-taraMgiNI

The Platonic culmination of Euclid and the pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity

ṛco akṣare parame vyoman

In the syllable of the ṛc set in the highest world,

And rst the fourfold root of all things hear!–

The pentagon-hexagon-decagon identity( ): If an equilateral pentagon is inscribed in a circle, then the

as the Golden ratio :

4 bloggers like this.

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