Photo courtesy of Bill Casselman

Containing some of the earliest extant diagrams from the period of classical Greek mathematics are a small number of ostraca which were found on Elephantine Island (just downstream from Aswan, on the frontier of ancient Egypt) around 1906 by a German expedition led by Otto Rubensohn. They are all apparently produced by the same person, and are related to the construction of regular icosahedra in Book XIII of Euclid's Elements. This photograph was taken at the Bode Museum in Berlin, where the ostraca are now located.

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