Nicoteles of Cyrene ( el, Νικοτέλης ὁ Κυρηναῖος) () was a
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
from
Cyrene.
He is mentioned in the preface to Book 4 of the ''Conics'' of
Apollonius, as criticising
Conon
Conon ( el, Κόνων) (before 443 BC – c. 389 BC) was an Athenian general at the end of the Peloponnesian War, who led the Athenian naval forces when they were defeated by a Peloponnesian fleet in the crucial Battle of Aegospotami; later he c ...
concerning the maximum number of points with which a
conic section
In mathematics, a conic section, quadratic curve or conic is a curve obtained as the intersection of the surface of a cone with a plane. The three types of conic section are the hyperbola, the parabola, and the ellipse; the circle is a spe ...
can meet another conic section. Apollonius states that Nicoteles claimed that the case in which a conic section meets opposite sections could be solved, but had not demonstrated how.
It is possible that Nicoteles could be a misspelling of
Nicomedes.
References
Bibliography
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Ancient Greek mathematicians
3rd-century BC Greek people
3rd-century BC mathematicians
People from Cyrenaica
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