History
Geometrical problems involving tangent circles have been pondered for millennia. In ancient Greece of the third century BC, Apollonius of Perga devoted an entire book to the topic. Unfortunately the book, which was called On Tangencies, is not among his surviving works.
René Descartes discussed the problem briefly in 1643, in a letter to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. He came up with essentially the same solution as given in equation (1) below, and thus attached his name to the theorem.
Frederick Soddy rediscovered the equation in 1936. The kissing circles in this problem are sometimes known as Soddy circles, perhaps because Soddy chose to publish his version of the theorem in the form of a poem titled The Kiss Precise, which was printed in Nature (June 20, 1936). Soddy also extended the theorem to spheres; Thorold Gosset extended the theorem to arbitrary dimensions.
Read more about this topic: Descartes' Theorem
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