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That tweet is merely about the way the formula was expressed, not about its mathematical content: > Archimedes discovered the formula many centuries before Eul
by quietbritishjim 7y ago
That tweet is merely about the way the formula was expressed, not about its mathematical content:
> Archimedes discovered the formula many centuries before Euler, although he could not express it in modern algebraic notation.
If Archimedes was able to express the formula in natural language (e.g. "take the radius of the hypersphere, multiply it by itself as many times as there are dimensions, ..." etc.) in a way that was unambiguously understood by other mathematicians (or natural philosophers) of the time, then that formula has definitely been discovered. Writing it in modern notation with one-character symbols for addition, multiplication (typically zero symbols!) etc. is nowhere near required for it to count as being discovered.