Commentary reminder

[Charlie in Dayton]

Check your local PBS station. Tonight's NOVA (8pm Eastern here) is about the Archimedes Palimpsest, which The Amazing One spoke of a week or so ago. (Man...just think how spooky that would be, to actually hold a document written personally by Archimedes...).

 

[Mr. Skinny]

Check your local PBS station. Tonight's NOVA (8pm Eastern here) is about the Archimedes Palimpsest, which The Amazing One spoke of a week or so ago. (Man...just think how spooky that would be, to actually hold a document written personally by Archimedes...).

I almost always watch Nova. Gonna watch this one tonight.

Is this the book that was erased and written over?

Should be interesting.

 

[Jim_MDP]

I'm gonna miss it this evening and I don't have a recorder. I've checked and it's not on late night or I would catch it then.

We have three PBS stations here but I haven't found a future schedule yet.

Here's the PBS site for the show and with a short slide show of how these documents came to be...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/

 

[T'ai Chi]

It was good...but too short in my opinion.

I had some notion that someone could have invented pre-calculus before Newton and Leibnitz..

 

[swellman]

Check your local PBS station. Tonight's NOVA (8pm Eastern here) is about the Archimedes Palimpsest, which The Amazing One spoke of a week or so ago. (Man...just think how spooky that would be, to actually hold a document written personally by Archimedes...).

[picky]The document is actually a 10th century copy of a copy of a copy...of a document personally written by Archimedes[/picky]

But you're right - it must have been breathtaking for the scholars who finally got their hands on this thing.

I watched the NOVA episode last night. Archimedes was "scary smart".

 

[Brown]

I just saw the "Nova" episode yesterday.

I was rather surprised to learn that Archimedes had developed some of the principles used in integral calculus. His actual technique, however, was not disclosed in the "Nova" episode.

I was also angered that religious folks and forgers had done such damage to this priceless work.

 

[Torlack]

Calculus is more about dealing with infinity and zero than the breaking up of things into smaller and smaller chunks. The idea is breaking stuff up had been long before calculus. However, it was how calculus finally delt with limits and such that made it important. If I remember my history correctly, Leibniz's method handled division by zero or the infinity aspect of calculus better. Newton's method was more about waving your hands in the air and pretending you didn't see that nasty division. Both systems worked but Leibniz's system is what we use today. (If I remember my history correctly).

 

[eli54]

Re: Re: Commentary reminder

[picky]The document is actually a 10th century copy of a copy of a copy...of a document personally written by Archimedes[/picky]

But you're right - it must have been breathtaking for the scholars who finally got their hands on this thing.

I watched the NOVA episode last night. Archimedes was "scary smart".

Went to Sea World San Diego and one of the things that stuck in my mind was the two giant Archimedes screws used lo lift the water to the top of the Shipwreck Rapids. The kids weren't near as impressed

 

[Brown]

Re: Re: Re: Commentary reminder

Went to Sea World San Diego and one of the things that stuck in my mind was the two giant Archimedes screws used lo lift the water to the top of the Shipwreck Rapids. The kids weren't near as impressed

I believe that cement mixers use Archimedes screws, don't they? The "threads" of the screw are on the inside of the mixer. If the mixer rotates in one direction, the threads churn up the cement, but if the mixer rotates in the other direction, the threads lift the cement out of the top of the mixer and deposit it on the chute.

As a kid, I always wondered how it was possible for cement to come out of the top of a cement mixer.

 

[eli54]

But you don't usually see them out in the open like that. It was a brilliant use of space and power. The electric motors they used to move thousands of gallons of water per minute were half the size of those needed for a conventional pumping system.

They were about 5 feet in diameter and painted red, made to be a part of the attraction.

 

[epepke]

If I remember my history correctly, Leibniz's method handled division by zero or the infinity aspect of calculus better. Newton's method was more about waving your hands in the air and pretending you didn't see that nasty division. Both systems worked but Leibniz's system is what we use today. (If I remember my history correctly).

Leibniz' notation was much better than Newton, and what we use today is closer to Leibniz' notation.

Neither Newton nor Leibniz nor even Fermat put the calculus on a solid basis. That had to wait for Euler.

 

[epepke]

If I remember my history correctly, Leibniz's method handled division by zero or the infinity aspect of calculus better. Newton's method was more about waving your hands in the air and pretending you didn't see that nasty division. Both systems worked but Leibniz's system is what we use today. (If I remember my history correctly).

Leibniz' notation was much better than Newton's, and what we use today is closer to Leibniz' notation.

Neither Newton nor Leibniz nor even Fermat put the calculus on a solid basis. That had to wait for Euler.