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Trying to read Archimedes
Aug. 22nd, 2017 09:54 pmThis weekend I was at an event for high school teachers and university teachers in math, where I and some other university teachers held lectures in whatever subject we liked, and then there were workshops where the high school teachers developed lessons to be held in high school based on our lectures. It was a lot of fun! I talked about spherical trigonometry and navigation, and it was interesting to meet the high school teachers.
The place we were at is a mansion in pretty much Sweden's richest neighboorhood, which is bizarre. It was once gifted to science by a rich mathematician and is now a math research institute, and I spent a couple of months there ten years ago after I got my Ph D. The librarian showed us the collection of old books, and among other things, they had a 16th century copy of Archimedes in both Greek and Latin! I was really quite awed at this. I tried my best and could make out maybe four words on one of the Greek pages, mostly stuff like "diameter" which is the same anyway. They also had a similarly old copy of the Almagest but sadly I only learned of that afterwards and didn't get to see it.
The place we were at is a mansion in pretty much Sweden's richest neighboorhood, which is bizarre. It was once gifted to science by a rich mathematician and is now a math research institute, and I spent a couple of months there ten years ago after I got my Ph D. The librarian showed us the collection of old books, and among other things, they had a 16th century copy of Archimedes in both Greek and Latin! I was really quite awed at this. I tried my best and could make out maybe four words on one of the Greek pages, mostly stuff like "diameter" which is the same anyway. They also had a similarly old copy of the Almagest but sadly I only learned of that afterwards and didn't get to see it.
