What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton
He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
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Alexandria
5 stories from this place.
The Librarian Who Measured the Earth With a Shadow
Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →The Mathematician the Mob Came For
Hypatia of Alexandria was the most famous philosopher in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 415 a crowd dragged her from her carriage and killed her with roof tiles.
Read the story →The Library That Did Not Burn
Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.
Read the story →The Lighthouse That Outlived Its Own Civilization
For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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