Leibniz wrote this manuscript on December 3/13, 1681. As far as we know, this is the first manuscript in which he explains how he found "a clear measure of the angle of contact".
This text is part of a wider investigation by Leibniz in 1679 into the question of transcendence. On this occasion, he reopened a file that he had probably closed at the end of his stay in Paris in 1676: the interpolation techniques of Wallis and Mengoli for squaring the circle.
This manuscript is a copy of the interpolation table found in Wallis' Arithmetica Infinitorum of 1656, at
proposition 135, p.165.
Despite being a small fragment, manuscript LH 35 3 A 16 Bl. 27 represents an important part of Leibniz’s corpus on dyadics. It was first published by Couturat in Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz (1907, 571) with a fairly precise transcription, albeit small mistakes.
This manuscript, dated around 1680, is particularly important in the context of the evolution of Leibniz’s work on dyadics, because it shows once again that the major developments in his approach happened after 1679 are connected with its study on the expression of a circle having diameter 1 (π/4) in the form of Gregory’s series.
