The problem which bears the name of the Italian geometer Malfatti, by whom it was first proposed and solved, has long attracted the attention and exercised the ingenuity of mathematicians, and has been made the subject of many careful and elaborate researches.

The great attention which has been bestowed upon this problem has arisen partly from its intrinsic difficulty, but chiefly on account of the extreme simplicity of the solution finally obtained by Malfatti, which seemed to open new views of geometrical research, and gave reason to hope that simple solutions might in like manner be found of many other geometrical problems usually accounted very difficult or insoluble.