Archimedes sent a fax to XXI century

By Bora Zivkovic | September 26, 2011 |




From: Archimedes and Euclid? Like String Theory versus Freshman Calculus by Davide Castelvecchi at Degrees of Freedom

Original Source: Archimedes himself, via Archimedes Palimpsest Project and
Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes

High powered x-rays of a 10th century prayer book reveal one of two surviving texts by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. The book has been dubbed Archimedes’ Palimpsest and will be on display starting next month at the Walters Art Musuem in Baltimore, MD. William Noel, who spearheaded the effort to reveal the hidden text, notes that watching the x-ray scan results come in real-time was “like receiving a fax from the 3rd Century B.C.”

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/image-of-the-week/2011/09/26/archimedes-sent-a-fax-to-xxi-century/

Absolutely faxcinatin'!

:hide:

on the method of mechanical theorem proving, did a serviceable job of providing a transcript. An English translation has been available for many many decades, and it is entirely possiuble to follow Archimedes' reasoning from it

Unfortunately, the popular writers at the Scientific American website have not really been very careful in their facts; I found there, for example,

... One was the “Method of Mechanical Theorems,” which describes the law of the lever and a technique to calculate a body’s center of gravity -- essentially the one still used today ...
A Tale of Math Treasure
An exhibition traces the reconstruction of a long-missing collection of writings by Archimedes
By Davide Castelvecchi
September 30, 2011
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-tale-of-math-treasure

But what Archimedes actually does is this: he provides heuristics for discovering some geometric theorems, by decomposing figures into lines and weighing the lines mentally on a balance beam. The problems he "solves" in this fashion were extremely difficult before the invention of the calculus: for example, Proposition 2 in the "Method" deduces the volume of a sphere. Archimedes did not consider this heuristic technique as providing proofs: it was simply a way to discover what precisely one should try to prove rigorously; so, for example, having "discovered" the volume of sphere by this balance-beam method, he elsewhere provided a rigorous proof by other methods

It will be good to have a critical edition of the "Method," but Archimedes will never be a best-selling author: he was a towering genius, and much of his work is simply hard-as-shizz

In the mid-1980s Princeton University Press republished Dijksterhuis' book on Archimedes: it is an excellent place to start if one wants a real appreciation of Archimedes' intellectual toolkit and results, but it is not at all any easy read

http://www.powells.com/biblio/63-9780306815805-0

It's a good read, but all this about Archimedes' being ahead of modern science is hyperbole.