Cube root this required the construction, now known to be impossible, of the length . A method for extracting cube roots appears in "The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art", a Chinese mathematical text compiled around the 2nd century BCE and commented on by Liu Hui in the 3rd century CE. The Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria devised a method for calculating cube roots in the 1st century CE. His formula is again mentioned by Eutokios in a commentary on Archimedes. In 499 CE Aryabhata, a mathematician-astronomer from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy, gave a method for finding
Doubling the cube given length times . In music theory, a natural analogue of doubling is the octave (a musical interval caused by doubling the frequency of a tone), and a natural analogue of a cube is three repetitions of the same interval. In this sense, the problem of doubling the cube is solved by the major third in equal temperament. This is a musical interval that is exactly one third of an octave. It multiplies the frequency of a tone by , the side length of the Delian cube. Doubling the cube Doubling the cube, also known as the Delian problem, is