Talk:Archimedes' use of infinitesimals

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Mathematics rating:	Start Class	Low Priority	Field: Analysis (historical)
Please update this rating as the article progresses, or if the rating is inaccurate. Click to show/hide comments. Please add to or update the comments to suggest improvements to the article. Needs references. Geometry guy 01:45, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Method

Some pages of the Method remained unused by the author of the Palimpsest and then they are still -surely forever- lost. Between them, an annonced result was about the volume of the intersection of two cylinders, a figure that Apostol and Mnatsakian have renamed n=4 Archimedian Globe (and the half of it, n=4 Archimedian Dome), whose volume relates to the n polygonal pyramid. This is amusing because the collaboration on indivisibles between Galileo and Cavalieri -ranging between years 1626 to around 1635- has as a main argument the hull and pyramid of the n=infinity dome. So in some sense it is true that the Method is only a theorem back from the modern infinitesimal theory.

See Apostol-Mnatsakanian in American Mathematical Monthly 111, June-July 2004 aditya kalra

[edit] Use of infinitesimals

A citation for "Archimedes disbelieved in the use of infinitesimals" is http://science-student.com/science-news/physics-news/a-long-lost-text-by-achimedes-found-contains-some-work-on-calculus. I can't work out how to put this in the article, but there it is for someone else to do so. 210.55.146.99 08:39, 23 October 2007 (UTC)