archimedes

This is a diagram from Reviel Netz and William Noel's book [The Archimedes Codex] How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist . It's part of Archimedes' proof that a parabolic segment is four-thirds the triangle it encloses and it's particularly astonishing. Most of us I'm sure have the silly figure of a naked man jumping out of a bath shouting "eureka" in our minds when we hear the word Archimedes. This extraordinary little book does a great job revealing the magnitude of this genius. I was shocked at how much I didn't know about who Archimedes was and what he had accomplished...