This makes it older than first thought

Feb 18, 2009 07:51 GMT  ·  By
The first mathematical operations involving infinity seem to belong to the Greek mathematician Archimedes
   The first mathematical operations involving infinity seem to belong to the Greek mathematician Archimedes

The concept of infinity is, apparently, older in mathematical and physical writings than first thought, researchers have recently announced in Chicago, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. According to their study, it was the Greek philosopher and mathematician Archimedes who first introduced the symbol to his writings, more than 2,000 years before the time another scientist was credited with the idea.

Reaching this conclusion wasn't easy for the people involved in the investigation, because the 348-page Archimedes Palimpsest, the scrolls on which the Greek genius wrote most of his work, had been partially destroyed by a monk several hundred years later, in order to write a prayer book on top. Another few centuries after that, another man drew pictures over the prayer book, further hiding Archimedes' work from the world.

Having recovered the remaining fragments, Reviel Netz, a classicist at Stanford University (SU), asked Uwe Bergmann, a scientist at the SU Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (a very powerful scanner that uses hair-thin X-rays), to focus on a few portions of the scrolls, which had been hinted at in 1906 by scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg. The SRL is so powerful, that it can map in the vicinity of one million pixels every hour. In addition, it was able to discover several new lines of text, buried deep beneath the paintings and the prayer book.

Thanks to the device's outstanding power of penetration, Netz and Bergmann were able to determine that, three hundred years before Christ, the Greek mathematician was actively involved in using the concept of infinity as a part of his work, the Method of Mechanical Theorems. “Scholars are now talking about some new words which are emerging in the reconstruction of the evidence in introduction to the Method, that Archimedes' concept of infinity was rather different from what was previously thought,” Bergamnn shared to a small group of reporters on Sunday.

More than 2,300 years ago, the Greek genius was working on a piece of parchment, making use of the concept of infinity in such calculations as the number of triangles in a prism, and other similar problems. He also figured out that potential infinity was different from actual infinity, which was something no one ahead of him had done before.