Note to Leibnitz and Newton… Archimedes beat you both.

 To those of you following the Leibnitz – Newton “who discovered calculus kerfuffle“, a  newly re-discovered Archimedes text has revealed that he actually had documented several calculus principles over 2,200 years ago.  More over at Science News on the riveting story of how x-ray fluorescence imaging revealed the underlying text after a 13th century Monk scraped the pages clean in order jot down some prayer...

 

“Archimedes computed the area of the curved figure (left) by enclosing it in a bigger one with straight edges (right). He then examined random slices to compute the volume—using the concept of actual infinity. “

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 02009 at 3:53 am and is filed under Technology.