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The Illustrated Method of Archimedes: Utilizing the Law of the Lever to Calculate Areas, Volumes and Centers of Gravity

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The Illustrated Method of Archimedes: Utilizing the Law of the Lever to Calculate Areas, Volumes and Centers of Gravity
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AuthorAndre K T Assis, Ceno Pietro Magnaghi
LanguageEnglish
SubjectHistory of physics, mechanics
Published2012
PublisherApeiron
Pages46
ISBN9780986492679

The Illustrated Method of Archimedes is a 2012 book by André K. T. Assis and Ceno Pietro Magnaghi, published by Apeiron (Montreal).

Overview

The book presents Archimedes's Method — the heuristic procedure, recovered from a text discovered by the philologist Johan Ludwig Heiberg in 1906, by which Archimedes used the law of the lever to find areas, volumes, and centres of gravity of geometric figures before proving them rigorously. Assis and Magnaghi concentrate on the physical reasoning, illustrating each lever in equilibrium and stating the postulates explicitly while keeping the mathematics to a minimum. The core of the book works through Archimedes's demonstrations of the area of a parabolic segment, the volume of a sphere, and the centre of gravity of a paraboloidal segment.

About the authors

André Koch Torres Assis is a Brazilian physicist at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) who works on the foundations and history of physics; Ceno Pietro Magnaghi is a collaborator at the same institution.

Publication details

External links