André Koch Torres Assis and Ceno Pietro Magnaghi Write About Archimedes's Method
After I published my previous post, entitled The Rediscovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest and His Use of the Infinite, I was contacted by Prof. André Koch Torres Assis of the University of Campinas in Brazil, who wrote to inform me that he and Ceno Pietro Magnaghi had written a short book—less than 40 pages of text—entitled The Illustrated Method of Archimedes: Utilizing the Law of the Lever to Calculate Areas, Volumes and Centers of Gravity. This work, available in English, Portuguese and Italian, presents how Archimedes developed mechanical proofs, as opposed to geometrical proofs, of some of his best known geometrical results.
These mechanical proofs, all using his law of the lever, are truly ingenious, and will be the focus of my next post.
In addition, Magnaghi and Assis published a complete translation from the Greek into Portuguese of the Method, entitled O Método de Arquimedes: Análise e Tradução Comentada [Arquimedes’s Method: Analysis and Commented Translation]. This book includes a detailed analysis of every theorem in the Method.
These books are available directly online as PDFs on Prof. Assis’s website, as well as from Amazon as print-on-demand, at low cost. Here are the books in question:
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excellent work, as always, from Assis
Thanks for sharing