Pentagramma Mirificum and elliptic functions

Abstract

We give an exposition of fragments from Gauss [G] where he discovered, with the help of some work of Jacobi, a remarkable connection between Napier pentagons on the sphere and Poncelet pentagons on the plane. As a corollary we find a parametrization in elliptic functions of the classical dilogarithm five-term relation.

14 pages