Archimedes’ Lost MethodArchimedes’ proofs of formulas for areas and volumes set the standard for the rigorous treatment of limits until modern times. But the way he discovered these results remained a mystery until 1906, when a copy of his lost treatise The Method was discovered in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey).
discussed in biographyMethod Concerning Mechanical Theorems describes a process of discovery in mathematics. It is the sole surviving work from antiquity, and one of the few from any period, that deals with this topic. In it Archimedes recounts how he used a “mechanical” method to arrive at some of his key discoveries, including the area of a parabolic segment and the surface area and volume of a...
history of mathematicsIn his work Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems, Archimedes also set out a special “mechanical method” that he used for the discovery of results on volumes and centres of gravity. He employed the bold notion of constituting solids from the plane figures formed as their sections (e.g., the circles that are the plane sections of spheres, cones, cylinders, and other...
Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems
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