 Kore7 says: Details have been released from the nine-year-long reconstruction project to recover the Greek mathematician's writings from this one-of-a-kind find and the results are fascinating. Buried beneath the surface of this gilded palimpsest, researchers discovered more extensive demonstrations of concepts such as infinite series, approximations, limits, and integral calculus than had been known to exist in ancient times. Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed "a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics." Wow. Where would we be as a society if various discoveries had come sooner? I have seen several specials on History Channel or Discovery talking about lost innovations or near-misses (e.g., the near invention of the steam engine in ancient Eygpt). It was amazing to see the feats in engineering, science, and math. One show indicated that the fires which destroyed ancient libraries were goldmines of knowledge that had to be re-discovered. Try reading The Genuis of China by Robert Temple. It tells how many discoveries credited to Europeans were made in China, some thousands of years before they were known elsewhere. By the time DaVinci "invented" the parachute, the chinese had been using them for 1,600 years. They were using the decimal system 3,400 years ago and described blood circulation 1,800 years before Harvey. Unfortunately, the politics and culture of China in the days of empire did not encourage the exploitation of many of these ideas. Were the fires gold mines or was it the libraries? Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. [...] Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes' book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink ...The loss. Imagine throwing away knowledge like that, and for what? This reminds me of the scean in Sagan's Cosmos where he imagines where we would be now if the great early civilizations had not gone bust. Any historians out there can reminds us or update us on how and why these great civilizations were lost? kmcolo, the original text was written by an unenlightened heathen who lived at a time before the light of salvation came unto the world. It had nothing to contribute to the knowledge of those who were bathed in the blood of Redemption. Similarly, all those demonic temples of false gods were torn down to build churches to the glory of God or ground into quicklime. Bravo! I see Jorjor's another graduate from the method school of commenting....  Never heard of it, Kore7. I was just writing from the worldview of that por monk who was starved for parchment. Ah, the method school of commenting! Bravo! You see what you've started Kmcolo? You're the Lee Strassberg of Method Commenting. Pretty soon you'll have to be interviewed by James Lipton! But speaking to the point at hand, I think it is fascinating that Archimedes began to derive the principles of calculus geometrically. This is also the way Newton developed his calculus, but it calculus still didn't catch until Leibniz defined it algebraically. The algebraic form of calculus is much more intuitive to most people and more easily applied to problems. Interestingly enough, there is a firm divide between algebraic thinkers and geometric thinkers. For instance, I can't solve any math problem wi... I think Jorjor has the right premise. Many eras of enlightenment, and scientific and technical advances, have been immediately followed by periods of superstition, religious fervor, and the destruction of knowledge. We may be skating towards the edge of another one of those plunges into darkness, with the spread of "intelligent design" being taught in schools, and creationist beliefs seeing a huge resurgence. It's just another thinly-disguised movement towards rejecting science as a whole. Intelligent thinkers are the biggest threat to "intelligent designers." Who knows, if much of Archimedes' work hadn't been lost, or supressed and hidden, maybe there would have been another Leibniz a millennium earlier. |
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