Cube this problem, and in 1837 Pierre Wantzel proved it to be impossible because the cube root of 2 is not a constructible number. The cube has three uniform colorings, named by the colors of the square faces around each vertex: 111, 112, 123. The cube has three classes of symmetry, which can be represented by vertex-transitive coloring the faces. The highest octahedral symmetry O has all the faces the same color. The dihedral symmetry D comes from the cube being a prism, with all four sides being the same color. The lowest symmetry D is also a prismatic symmetry, with
Doubling the cube at solving what they saw as an obstinate but soluble problem. However, the nonexistence of a solution was finally proven by Pierre Wantzel in 1837. In algebraic terms, doubling a unit cube requires the construction of a line segment of length , where ; in other words, . This is because a cube of side length 1 has a volume of , and a cube of twice that volume (a volume of 2) has a side length of the cube root of 2. The impossibility of doubling the cube is therefore equivalent to the statement that is not a constructible