structural:scholar_edition, structural:reformatting
Relationship to constructible polygons

Carl Friedrich Gauss developed the theory of Gaussian periods in his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae and formulated a sufficient condition for the constructibility of regular polygons. Gauss stated that this condition was also necessary, but never published a proof. Pierre Wantzel gave a full proof of necessity in 1837. The result is known as the Gauss–Wantzel theorem:

A positive integer n is of the above form if and only if its totient φ (n) is a power of 2.