Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Method of Mechanical Theorems (Greek: Περὶ μηχανικῶν θεωρημάτων πρὸς Ἐρατοσθένη ἔφοδος), also referred to as The Method, is one of the major surviving works of the ancient Greek polymath Archimedes. The Method takes the form of a letter from Archimedes to Eratosthenes, [1] the chief librarian ...
Archimedes uses no trigonometry in this computation and the difficulty in applying the method lies in obtaining good approximations for the square roots that are involved. Trigonometry, in the form of a table of chord lengths in a circle, was probably used by Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria to obtain the value of π given in the Almagest (circa ...
The method of exhaustion typically required a form of proof by contradiction, known as reductio ad absurdum. This amounts to finding an area of a region by first comparing it to the area of a second region, which can be "exhausted" so that its area becomes arbitrarily close to the true area.
Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes (1805) by Benjamin West. Archimedes was born c. 287 BC in the seaport city of Syracuse, Sicily, at that time a self-governing colony in Magna Graecia. The date of birth is based on a statement by the Byzantine Greek scholar John Tzetzes that Archimedes lived for 75 years before his death in 212 BC. [8]
The first recorded algorithm for rigorously calculating the value of π was a geometrical approach using polygons, devised around 250 BC by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, implementing the method of exhaustion. [48] This polygonal algorithm dominated for over 1,000 years, and as a result π is sometimes referred to as Archimedes's constant ...
The most famous of these is Archimedes' method of exhaustion, one of the earliest uses of the mathematical concept of a limit, as well as the origin of Archimedes' axiom which remains part of the standard analytical treatment of the real number system. The original proof of Archimedes is not rigorous by modern standards, because it assumes that ...
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, originally a Byzantine Greek copy of a compilation of Archimedes and other authors. It contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost (the Ostomachion and the Method of Mechanical Theorems) and the only surviving original Greek edition of his work On Floating ...
Systematic methods of computing the value of π exist. If one knows that π is approximately 3.14159, then it trivially follows that π < 22 / 7 , which is approximately 3.142857. But it takes much less work to show that π < 22 / 7 by the method used in this proof than to show that π is approximately 3.14159.