WHEEL OF THEODORUS

• Theodorus of Cyrene, who lived around 425 B.C., was a philosopher of ancient Greece. It is said that he discovered the construction below, which is therefore called " the wheel of Theodorus ".
• Also called as spiral of Theodorus, square root spiral, Einstein spiral or Pythagorean spiral.
• The spiral is started with an isosceles right triangle with base and height of unit ( equal to 1 ) length and the hypotenuse obtained is √2. The hypotenuse of second triangle is √3 and the third triangle hypotenuse is √4 and so on.
• Each triangle is formed using the hypotenuse of previous triangle.
• The 16th triangle has hypotenuse eqal to √17.
• Theodorus stopped at √17 because it the hypotenuse of last triangle that does not overlap the figure.