The curve was alluded to by Proclus in his commentary on Euclid and attributed to Diocles by Geminus as early as the beginning of the 1st century.
[2] Fragments of a work by Diocles entitled On burning mirrors were preserved by Eutocius in his commentary of Archimedes' On the Sphere and the Cylinder and also survived in an Arabic translation of the lost Greek original titled Kitāb Dhiyūqlīs fī l-marāyā l-muḥriqa (lit.
[3] Historically, On burning mirrors had a large influence on Arabic mathematicians, particularly on al-Haytham, the 11th-century polymath of Cairo whom Europeans knew as "Alhazen".
One of the fragments contains propositions seven and eight, which is a solution to the problem of dividing a sphere by a plane so that the resulting two volumes are in a given ratio.
[4] In the same work, Diocles, just after demonstrating that the parabolic mirror could focus the rays in a single point, he mentioned that It is possible to obtain a lens with the same property.