Archimedes--The true finder of calculus. It's a toss up with Nikola Tesla as least appreciated work.
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a
palimpsest on
parchment in the form of a
codex which originally was a copy of an otherwise unknown work of the ancient
mathematician,
physicist, and
engineer Archimedes of
Syracuse. Archimedes lived in the
third century BC, but the copy was made in the
10th century by an anonymous scribe. In the
12th century the codex was
unbound and washed,
in order that the parchment leaves could be folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text. Fortunately, the erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes' work is still in large part legible today, using combinations of ultraviolet and visible light. It was a book of nearly 90 pages before being made a palimpsest of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book. In
1906 it was briefly inspected in
Constantinople and was published, from photographs, by the
Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg (
1854-
1928); shortly thereafter it was translated into
English by
Thomas Heath. Before that it was not widely known among mathematicians, physicists, or historians.
Although the only mathematical tools at its author's disposal were what we might now consider secondary-school geometry, Archimedes used those methods with rare brilliance, explicitly using infinitesimals to solve problems that would now be treated by integral calculus, which was independently reinvented in the 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Among those problems were that of calculating the center of gravity of a solid hemisphere, the center of gravity of a frustum of a circular paraboloid, and the area of a region bounded by a parabola and one of its secant lines. Contrary to historically ignorant statements found in some
20th century calculus textbooks, he did not use anything like
Riemann sums, either in the work embodied in this palimpsest or in any of his other works. For explicit details of the method used, see
how Archimedes used infinitesimals.
A problem solved exclusively in the
Method is the calculation of the volume of a cylindrical wedge, a result that reappears as theorem XVII (schema XIX) of
Kepler's
Stereometria.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
slave_to_reason The realization of the power of
infinitesimals in the
third century BC and not seeing its reappearance until the 17th century
by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz makes me think Archimedes was the founder, and most important contributor to mathematics. Nikola Tesla's work deserves review as he was a one in twenty billion thinker. It is incredible to read Tesla, and
very humbling.
