Square root of 5 one, when traversing the cube "surface" (the shortest distance when traversing through the "inside" of the cube corresponds to the length of the cube diagonal, which is the square root of three times the edge). The number can be algebraically and geometrically related to and , as it is the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with catheti measuring and (again, the Pythagorean theorem proves this). Right triangles of such proportions can be found inside a cube: the sides of any triangle defined by the centre point of a cube, one of its vertices, and the middle point
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