"A very simple but instructive problem was treated by Jacob Steiner, the famous representative of geometry at the University of Berlin in the early nineteenth century. Three villages A, B, C are to be joined by a system of roads of minimum length. " Due to this remark of Courant and Robbins (1941), a problem received its name that actually reaches two hundred years further back and should more appropriately be attributed to the French mathematician Pierre Fermat. At the end of his famous treatise "Minima and Maxima" he raised the question to find for three given points in the plane a fourth...
"A very simple but instructive problem was treated by Jacob Steiner, the famous representative of geometry at the University of Berlin in the early ni...
