Comments on: Archimedes’ stomachion http://www.neverendingbooks.org/index.php/archimedes-stomachion.html lieven le bruyn's blog Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:50:41 +0100 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Jonathan Vos Post http://www.neverendingbooks.org/index.php/archimedes-stomachion.html/comment-page-1#comment-4921 Jonathan Vos Post Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:30:14 +0000 http://www.neverendingbooks.org/index.php/archimedes-stomachion.html#comment-4921 <p>I've discussed with my teacher from the late 1960s Prof. Tom Apostol (emeritus at Caltech's Math department, age 82, and publishing more and better than ever) the new discoveries that Archimedes dealt in a very sophisticated way with cardinal infinity, in a way previously thought entirely lacking in classical Greek mathematics and philosophy.</p> <p>Not that I expect a palimpsest to surface in which Archimedes anticipates Cantor's diagonalization, any more than I expect a lost book of Euclid to appear which goes beyond his beautiful proof that there are an infinite number of primes, and shows that there are an infinite number of twin primes.</p> I’ve discussed with my teacher from the late 1960s Prof. Tom Apostol (emeritus at Caltech’s Math department, age 82, and publishing more and better than ever) the new discoveries that Archimedes dealt in a very sophisticated way with cardinal infinity, in a way previously thought entirely lacking in classical Greek mathematics and philosophy.

Not that I expect a palimpsest to surface in which Archimedes anticipates Cantor’s diagonalization, any more than I expect a lost book of Euclid to appear which goes beyond his beautiful proof that there are an infinite number of primes, and shows that there are an infinite number of twin primes.

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