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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.
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".
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 .
Gillian Bradshaw was born in Falls Church, Virginia, [1] and spent part of her youth in Santiago, Chile.She attended the University of Michigan, where she won the Phillips Prize for Classical Greek in 1975 and 1977, as well as the Hopwood Prize for fiction for her first novel, Hawk of May.
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Archimedes dedicated to him his treatise The Sand Reckoner, in which he addresses him by the title of king. [5] [better source needed] The coins referred [clarification needed] by earlier writers to the elder Gelon are admitted by some numismatists to belong to this prince. The head on the obverse is possibly that of Gelo himself.