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Miss Cellania
October 8, 2007
by Miss Cellania - October 8, 2007 - 1:28 AM

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Jason Lewis has completed a round-the-world trip, traveling by his own muscle power only. It took him over 13 years, due to injuries and incredible misadventures.

A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus. This discovery puts the beginnings of calculus 2,000 years earlier than we thought.

The new Sony Bravia Playdoh bunnies ad is out. There are some questions about where the original idea came from.

Could you pass eighth grade science? Yes, I can. I even got an A!

The ten worst presentation moments. Imagine speaking to a roomful of strangers you want to impress, and your requested PowerPoint is interpreted as an electrical outlet, or your shoes are superglued to the carpet.

If you like these, there are lots more new links in the right sidebar!

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Comments (3)

  1. If we are talking about Archimedes here, that was well over 200 years before the whole Newton/Liebnitz thing…

    posted by MathFreak on 10-8-2007 at 5:38 am

  2. You got me! That should be 2,000 years.

    posted by Miss Cellania on 10-8-2007 at 6:21 am

  3. This isn’t necessarily that surprising. One of the coolest arguments in beginning geometry is the area of a sphere being equal to two cones subtracted from a cylinder. The reason this works is that if properly proportioned, each cross-section at equivalent heights gives the same area. This principal of cross-sectional equivalence is Archimedes’s, on which he wrote about in length in a book called “On the Sphere and the Cylinder”. The key here is that the argument is similar to a Riemannian integral, treating the volume as an infinite sum of planes.
    Archimedes was also familiar with infinite series, having used them to come up with a rough argument for the area under a parabola, and of course his method of approximating Pi which is in the linked article. I would say that given his already known texts’ illustrations of the infinite, that finding a book that makes the next step is not as surprising as it is yet another illustration of his brilliance.

    posted by Leadhyena on 10-8-2007 at 12:50 pm

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