3 ms·
Wish we had much of a clue -- we're lucky even as much of his own work survived as did. There seems to be a strong tendency to overestimate surviving authors an
by abecedarius 7y ago
Wish we had much of a clue -- we're lucky even as much of his own work survived as did. There seems to be a strong tendency to overestimate surviving authors and underestimate their civilization. (Saying this although he's a hero of mine.)
I guess Einstein was no von Neumann, but gosh what a beautiful mind -- even with so much I didn't understand in "Subtle is the Lord...", it's worth a read.
- kragen 7y agoI should read it! I guess it's possible that Archimedes invented the integral calculus a hundred generations before Newton and Leibniz because Syracuse was teeming with calculus-like ideas that didn't get written down, and things like the Antikythera Mechanism suggest that there were a lot of important intellectual achievements refined through broad communities of practice that didn't survive. But it seems just as likely to me that Archimedes was just that good.
- abecedarius 7y agoSome known background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudoxus_of_Cnidus#Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudoxus_of_Cnidus#Mathematics (A tidbit about that Definition 5 there: I read in Russo that Galileo could not see the point of it. To him a ratio was a concrete thing, a number you got by dividing two other numbers. His civilization, says Russo, had lost the concept of freely invented axiomatic definitions and didn't really recover it till the 19th C.) I like to think of Archimedes as the first mathematical physicist. Of course Euclidean geometry itself is a physical theory, so there's one ground to disagree.