A quiz question · hard
What technique in Archimedes's *Method of Mechanical Theorems* anticipated what later mathematics?
Archimedes used balance-point arguments to sum the volumes of curved solids by treating them as infinite collections of thin slices, then reconstructed his answers with rigorous geometric proof. The technique is recognisably integration. The *Method* was lost from the 5th century until Heiberg identified it in a Constantinople palimpsest in 1906 — almost two and a half millennia after it was written.
Read the full story →From the story
What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
Related questions
- Archimedes is supposed to have run naked through Syracuse shouting *Eureka!* — 'I have found it!' — after a sudden insight came to him while bathing. What had he figured out?
- Where did Archimedes work out the principle of displacement, according to Vitruvius?
- Which Greek astronomer proposed that the Earth orbits the Sun — eighteen centuries before Copernicus?
- The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 13th-century Greek prayer book whose vellum pages were originally scraped Archimedes manuscripts. Some of the works it preserves — including the *Method of Mechanical Theorems* — exist nowhere else. Who identified the underlying Archimedes text, and when?