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The genius of ancient mechanics

Submitted by Milica on Mon, 2008/04/14 - 14:29. General Science
Scientists and mathematicians of the past may not have had computers and other modern scientific instruments to help in their study, but they were pretty darn smart in their abilities to figure things out. The Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought, a recent article in the New York Times looks at what our scientific forebears knew and how they used these ideas.

From the article:

"There are a surprising number of old, and extremely old, scientific texts that have survived the ravages of time in one form or another. The Archimedes Web site lists far more than 100, including Euclid’s geometry, Hero of Alexandria’s Roman-era technical manual on crossbows and catapults, medieval treatises on algebra and mechanics by Jordanus de Nemore and Galileo’s 17th-century defense of a heliocentric solar system."
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