Princess Dido: Geometry of an Ox Skin
Princess Dido: The Geometry of an Ox Skin is an outdoor, multi-day geometry project that challenges an ancient Greek legend with help from the principles of area, perimeter, and The Fundamental Theorem of Similarity. In the epic story, The Aneid, a tale of told of a Phoenician princess named Dido (pronounced Dee-Dough) who was forced to flee her homeland. When she arrived in a new land, the king would only sell her "as much land as she could enclose in an ox skin." Undaunted, she and her subjects proceeded to slice the ox skin into thin strips which she tied together to encompass an extensive plot of land which she used to start her new life. The goal of this project is to replicate Dido's ingenious solution using a bed sheet as the ox skin. Below are pictures of students attempting to encompass a football field with the strips of "ox hide."
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