The “curious” property noted by Mr. A. P. Rollett (Note 1261 in the Mathematical Gazette for December 1937), with regard to the centres of circles touching one another and inscribed in the space between two given circles, leads to an interesting general theorem on all such sets of circles.

Given any two circles, and a set of circles touching one another and the two given circles, then, if r1r2, r3 are the radii of three successive circles of the set, of which r2 is known, r1 and r3 are the roots of a quadratic equation of which the coefficients are simple functions of r2 and the radii of the given circles.