Compass rose two adjacent cardinal directions. For example, North-by-east (NbE) is one quarter wind from North towards East, Northeast-by-north (NEbN) is one quarter wind from Northeast toward North. Naming all 32 points on the rose is called "boxing the compass". The 32-point rose has the uncomfortable number of 11° between points, but is easily found by halving divisions and may have been easier for those not using a 360° circle. Using gradians, of which there are 400 in a circle, the sixteen-point rose will have twenty-five gradians per point. Linguistic anthropological studies have shown that most human communities have four points of
Straightedge and compass construction these straightedge and compass constructions have been shown to be logically impossible to perform. (The problems themselves, however, are solvable, and the Greeks knew how to solve them, "without" the constraint of working only with straightedge and compass.) The most famous of these problems, squaring the circle, otherwise known as the quadrature of the circle, involves constructing a square with the same area as a given circle using only straightedge and compass. Squaring the circle has been proven impossible, as it involves generating a transcendental number, that is, . Only certain algebraic numbers can be constructed with ruler and compass