Note to Leibnitz and Newton… Archimedes beat you both.

[bananas]

http://blog.longnow.org/2009/01/19/note-to-leibnitz-and-newton-archimedes-beat-you-both/

Note to Leibnitz and Newton… Archimedes beat you both.
January 19th, 02009 by Alexander Rose

To those of you following the Leibnitz - Newton “who discovered calculus kerfuffle“, a newly re-discovered Archimedes text has revealed that he actually had documented several calculus principles over 2,200 years ago. More over at Science News on the riveting story of how x-ray fluorescence imaging revealed the underlying text after a 13th century Monk scraped the pages clean in order jot down some prayer...

[Jackpine Radical]

1. God love those monks...

always ready to destroy anything they don't understand--which is pretty much everything.

[On the Road]

2. Strangely Enough,

there is video of Archimedes going head-to-head with Liebnitz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79vdlEcWxvM

That Archimedes, he could beat you six ways from Sunday.

[chaplainM]

3. It's a "palimpsest"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palimpsest

NOVA did a program about this about 5 years ago. The whole topic is fascinating.

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

[BlooInBloo]

4. There are few things more annoying than people who don't know any math...

commenting on math.

That goes double for the history of math.

[Confusious]

5. Well, then he gets the blame also

For my headaches from Calc 2. THE BASTARD!

[pokerfan]

6. The Greeks essentially discovered the calculus

in their quest for pi. I highly recommend http://search.barnesandnoble.com/History-of-Pi/Peter-Beckman/e/9780312381851">History of Pi by Beckmann.

[Lionel Mandrake]

7. Yes and no.

Archie had a method for computing volumes. It was sort of like integral calculus, except that what he did required creativity for each new problem - sort of like what Newton did in the Principia, but unlike Newton's fluxions, which were similar to Leibniz's version of calculus.

Archie's achievement was remarkable, considering that he had neither an algebraic notation nor the idea of Cartesian coordinates.

Great cartoon, btw.