Regular star polyhedra in the nineteenth-century Italian treatise

I poligoni stellati: origini storiche ed implicazioni didattiche

The genesis of mathematical concepts in the evolutionary line of human thought in the long story and the genesis in individual optics possess evident analogies. Starting from this assumption, we describe an activity presented to 15-year-old students; the aim was to consolidate fundamental concepts of Euclidean geometry related to regular polygons. The experimentation has used a didactic approach based on the historical evolution of the formal definition of regular star polygon through the centuries. The activity and the results obtained in terms of internalization of the concepts in the students are showed.