Towards a Completion of Archimedes' Treatise on Floating Bodies

Kurt Girstmair; Gerhard Kirchner

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 0706.0119

Towards a Completion of Archimedes' Treatise on Floating Bodies

Kurt Girstmair·Gerhard Kirchner

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In his treatise on floating bodies Archimedes determines the equilibrium positions of a floating paraboloid segment, but only in the case when the basis of the segment is either completely outside of the fluid or completely submerged. Here we give a mathematical model for the remaining case, i.e., two simple conditions which describe the equilibria in closed form. We provide tools for finding all equilibria in a reliable way and for the classification of these equilibria. This paper can be considered as a continuation of a recent article of Rorres.

Explore related subjects

math.HO math-ph math.MP

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Kurt Girstmair, Gerhard Kirchner. 2007-06-01. Towards a Completion of Archimedes' Treatise on Floating Bodies. https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0119

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Training Mathematicians in the Age of AI: Intellectual Agency, Cognitive Offloading, and the PhD Thesis

Powerful artificial intelligence is weakening the traditional relationship between mathematical output and evidence of mathematical expertise. In particular, the production of an original theorem or a polished dissertation can no longer, by itself, certify the intellectual formation of its nominal author. I argue that graduate mathematical education should therefore be organized around the formation of intellectual agency: internal technical competence, mathematical judgment, understanding, and responsible participation in a shared intellectual culture. I distinguish productive from premature cognitive offloading, propose complementary independent and AI-augmented modes of training, and suggest a corresponding reformulation of the role of the PhD thesis and dissertation defense. More broadly, I argue that academic mathematics should understand itself increasingly as an institution for the reproduction and stewardship of human mathematical expertise rather than primarily as a mechanism for producing theorems.

math.HO↗

arXiv2026

Percolation on Finite Graphs

Lecture notes from a graduate course given by Michael Krivelevich at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel Aviv University in the spring semester of 2026. Topics covered include: phase transition and the giant component in $G(n,p)$; long paths and cycles in supercritical and sparse random graphs; thresholds for connectedness and perfect matching; general model of a random subgraph of a finite graph; phase transition and the giant component in the random hypercube; polynomial diameter of the giant component; perfect matchings in the random hypercube.

math.HO↗

arXiv2026

The Siren Call of Silicon Leviathan: Reflections on blowup and Aufklärungsdämmerung

On 8 September 2026 OpenAI announced a proof of finite-time blowup for the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with smooth data and forcing: 166 pages produced in 88 hours by ten thousand agents, certified by 616,000 lines of Lean, and read in full, at the moment of this writing (20 September 2026), by no human being. This essay asks what such an artifact -- text, certificate and announcement -- is, and what follows from accepting it as a proof. Mathematics was the Enlightenment's existence proof of autonomous reason: for three centuries every certified theorem could be understood by anyone who followed its demonstration, and the distance between the two was zero by construction. A certified proof no one can follow reopens that distance, and a community that accepts it adopts, without a vote, the constitution Hobbes drafted for the Leviathan, in which authority and not truth makes the law. The essay distinguishes the demonstrated from the revealed (certified); names, in Panofsky's terms, the coming age a Middle Ages in reverse and its authority a subhuman superintelligence; and locates the turning point not in what the machine produces but in what we accept. Since acceptance is the one sovereign sanction the companies cannot manufacture, it proposes a covenant in place of either boycott or capitulation: the community's cooperation given to that producer which strictly observes its practices of legibility, disclosure and responsibility, withheld from any that does not, and the covenant kept plural, with the history of the Indigenous nations among rival empires as its guide. The Sirens of the title promise knowledge, not understanding. Daemmerung is the light at both ends of the day, and whether this Aufklaerungsdaemmerung is a dusk or a dawn depends on what is done at the moment of acceptance, which is not yet past.

math.HO↗