did Archimedes discover calculus 1300 years before Newton ???

Science and Mathematics brilliance. Religion and persecution. World War I and II and Nazi possession of ancient artificats. Modern forensic miracles and plain old good luck.

I happened to catch an epsiode of PBS-NOVA which featured the recent discovery of the only known copy of Archimedes' "The Method", a collection of theorems and his derivations and insights.

Although well-known for his innovations on war machines (e.g., he invented a variable-range catapault which kept the Roman ships at bay from invading Sicily) and engineering expertise (e.g., through a complex system of pulleys and levers he moved a warship all by himself, and boasted that he could lift the world itself if he had a place to stand on), history will remember him as the discoverer of the value of "pi" (3.14) which he deduced from placing triangles of ever smaller sizes inside a circle.

He computed volumes of complex shapes by summing a series of triangles that approached infinity. Modern scholars now realize that he had uncovered the basics of calculus that the world would embrace many centuries later. After Rome successfully invaded his homeland and a soldier killed him by accident, mathematics and science were obscured in the Dark Ages. Archimedes' "The Method" was erased by a monk who needed the parchment for a prayer book.

It resurfaced hundreds of years of later as an investigator was able to uncover some of the washed-out Greek text written perpendicular to the prayer text. But it wasn't until a mysterious billionaire bought this ancient manuscript at auction and donated it to a museum that a team of world-class experts in mathematics, Greek language, and modern restoration forensics began a quest to unlock the genius of Archimedes and wondered how much modern science would have advanced if his calculus methods had been adopted.

The NOVA website on "Infinite Secrets" is at => www.pbs.org... . A transcript of the show can be viewed there as a web page. I've also archived that as a printable MS-WOrd document at www.stealthskater.com... .

It is also listed as Item #24 at => www.stealthskater.com... . It makes one wonder if anyone else in the past was way ahead of their time and had their memoirs deliberately or accidentally hidden-or-destroyed.

Interesting find, I never knew Archimedes did such things.

Perhaps either of them never actually discovered calculus, but are credited to making major contributions to it. Calculus is a very broad and complex subject, like algebra. I'm think that teh concepts have been in existance for a long time, but the people who have been attributed to actually discovering them probably made sense out of them by proving them or relating them to other concepts, etc...

For example, the Pythagorean Theorem, used for finding lengths of a right triangle.

a^2-b^2=c^2

Pythagoras was attributed to "inventing" this famous formula, but actually, it has been around for many years before. He was just the first person to prove it and make some sense out of it.