Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Sand Reckoner (Greek: Ψαμμίτης, Psammites) is a work by Archimedes, an Ancient Greek mathematician of the 3rd century BC, in which he set out to determine an upper bound for the number of grains of sand that fit into the universe. In order to do this, Archimedes had to estimate the size of the universe according to the contemporary ...
[21] [22] In the Sand-Reckoner, Archimedes gives his father's name as Phidias, an astronomer about whom nothing else is known. [22] [23] A biography of Archimedes was written by his friend Heracleides, but this work has been lost, leaving the details of his life obscure.
By Archimedes's calculation, the universe of Aristarchus (roughly 2 light years in diameter), if fully packed with sand, would contain 10 63 grains. If the much larger observable universe of today were filled with sand, it would still only equal 10 95 grains. Another 100,000 observable universes filled with sand would be necessary to make a googol.
In his book The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes used the myriad as the base of a number system designed to count the grains of sand in the universe. As was noted in 2000: [ 5 ] In antiquity Archimedes gave a recipe for reducing multiplication to addition by making use of geometric progression of numbers and relating them to an arithmetic progression .
A typical page from the Archimedes Palimpsest. The text of the prayer book is seen from top to bottom, the original Archimedes manuscript is seen as fainter text below it running from left to right Discovery reported in the New York Times on July 16, 1907
One of the earliest examples of this is The Sand Reckoner, in which Archimedes gave a system for naming large numbers. To do this, he called the numbers up to a myriad myriad (10 8) "first numbers" and called 10 8 itself the "unit of the second numbers".
"The fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, while the Earth revolves about the Sun." — Archimedes' description of the heliocentric model in his work The Sand Reckoner, based on the work by Aristarchus of Samos. Τὰ πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει. Tà pánta rheî kaì oudèn ménei. "Everything flows, nothing stands ...
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us; Pages for logged out editors learn more