Talk:Archimedes

Draft. Some of the obvious things here include:

• The "Eureka" thing
• Archimedes' screw
• The principle of the lever
• The buoyancy principle
• Machines invented for the defense of Syracuse
• Books written
• Some info on π.

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Someone wrote the following about the statement that the area of a parabola is equal to 4/3 the area of the triangle with the same base and height":

(This proposition must be understood as follows. The "base" may be taken to be a secant line of the parabola, not necessarily orthogonal to the axis of the parabola, but one must construe the word "base" in the formula to mean the component of its length in a direction orthogonal to the axis of the parabola, ignoring the component parallel to the axis; the "height" is the length of a segment parallel to the axis of the parabola, running from the midpoint of the base to the curve.)

Now, the way I remember this, Archimedes himself defined base as the length of the secant line, summit as the point of tangency of a line parallel to the base, and height as the distance from the base to the summit. This also seems simpler and more cogent that the explanation given in the page. While I gather a copy of the original text to double-check, I have moved the questionable content here.

-- Miguel

The "dubious" material that you moved to the talk page is indeed correct. It would be strange for Archimedes to define the base as the length of anything, rather than as the line segment itself. I will put the dubious material back, but phrased more simply and with an illustration. 131.183.73.153 01:35 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The reason I just reverted newly inserted references to "the Roman king" is that there was no Roman king in the time of Archimedes. Michael Hardy 21:31, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

... and besides, Archimedes was killed in the invasion, so no one could have been friendly with him. Michael Hardy 21:32, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Categorisation

I deleted categ:Mathematicians since the existing categ:Ancient mathematicians was/is already a subcategory of Mathematicians. No around the houses - a straight subcategory. Now we have categ:Mathematicians reinstated and so we have both categ:Mathematicians and categ:Ancient mathematicians - redundancy. Is there a general problem in recognising that an Ancient mathematician is automatically a Mathematician??

None at all. If individual mathematicians generally are to be listed in a category, then it would be absurd to exclude Archimedes.

Similar constructs occur in other science categories, without the general need for redundant categorisations. Ian Cairns 01:45, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Can I chip in and say that the nationality categorisation of mathematicians is problematic, in some cases, and should not really be pushed to the limits. I have left a note at Emil Artin, for example. For Besicovitch, there is a Category:Russian Jewish mathematicians that applies, and I think one could also say he was British. Multiple categories and redundancy is actually preferable to trying too hard to pigeonhole people. There is in fact little actual harm in having Category:Mathematicians applied to Pythagoras, for example, as well as Category:Ancient mathematicians. Some people using WP will not know Pythagoras was ancient (strange but true). Charles Matthews 09:52, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Footnote to that - it seems there is ongoing debate about the correct way to use categories for Russian or Soviet Jews. We should probably wait for consensus on that. Charles Matthews

Archimedes should also be categorized as a (theoretical) physicist. He founded statics and hydraulics and wrote on cosmology. — Miguel 12:25, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)