Points of the compass 32-wind compass rose is yielded from the eight principal winds, eight half-winds and sixteen quarter-winds combined together, with each compass direction point at an ° angle from the next. In the mariner's exercise of boxing the compass, all thirty-two points of the compass are named in clockwise order. The traditional compass rose of eight winds (and its 16-wind and 32-wind derivatives) was invented by seafarers in the Mediterranean Sea during the Middle Ages (with no obvious connection to the twelve classical compass winds of the ancient Greeks and Romans). The traditional mariner's wind names were expressed in Italian, or more
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