Note to Leibnitz and Newton… Archimedes beat you both.
January 19th, 02009 by Alexander Rose
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, 2009 at 3:53 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on January 19th, 2009 at 6:50 am
[...] via Long Now [...]
Posted on January 19th, 2009 at 9:43 am
[...] Ancient Greeks, Archimedes, History, Math, Newton, Science and Technology. trackback It turns out Archimedes discovered some of the basic principles of calculus that had to wait until Newton and Leibnitz to be [...]
Posted on January 19th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
It’s important to remember that integration is only half of calculus. And inventing differentiation outside the context of Cartesian geometry and (ahem) Newtonian physics was not likely to happen. But there is no doubt that Archimedes pioneered limit theory that underlies both and much else besides.
Posted on January 20th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
The critical contribution of Newton and Leibniz to the Calculus was showing the inverse relationship between differentiation and integration. Fermat had laid out a good deal of this several decades earlier for particular cases like polynomials, but not for general functions. Archimedes’ achievements were remarkable, and there’s a lot we don’t know about his work, but there is no evidence that he was close to this particular realization.
Posted on January 25th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
[...] Did Archimedes beat Newton and Leibnitz to calculus? [...]
Posted on January 26th, 2009 at 9:58 am
[...] Archimedes Codex.The entire text is available for free on Google Books(you might needthis). (vialong now) Tags:archimedesissacnewtongottfriedleibnizmathematicscalculusBy [...]
Posted on February 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
This subject was covered in detail by BBC’s Horizon back in 2001. Here’s the website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/archimedestrans.shtml