You ought to read "On floating bodies" by Archimedes.
Check this. There are damn few calculus students who could solve the problem of the floating paraboloid.
. I'll take Aristotle for a greater understanding of the world.
I'm not so sure. He just reasoned (no experiment) his way into the false assertion that heavier things fall faster; Archimedes, trying to find the formula for the area of a parabola, cut models out of sheet metal and weighed them, the proved the result rigorously.
Aristotle was Alexander the Great's tutor. Archimedes held off the Roman Army and Navy for a year. See the life of Marcellus by Plutarch. or here
Unfortunately, there is no contemporary evidence that he set fire to Roman ships with mirrors. However, ships have been found in Syracuse harbor with boulders on top of them.
Don't bother going over all my posts (not that your'e inclined to), but I had, admittedly, worked myself into a frenzy and became long-winded and was a little flippant at this point because I didn't feel philosophy needed to be looked down upon in order for science to be what it is in its own right.
So I'll concede without reservation that Archimedes was indeed a superior scientist and engineer. I learned a little more about his combat engineer prowess tonight, thanks again.
When I posted:I'll take Aristotle for a greater understanding of the world. I should gone more along the lines in emphasizing my appreciation of Aristotle's advances in thinking in helping man consider the nature of being and reality.
He's probaly not real popular in the science circles due to his scientific missteps. Don't have the link for the following:
Aristotle lived before the age of specialization, so that he studied and lectured on every conceivable topic: physics logic, biology, literary criticism, psychology, astronomy, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. What is now usually defined as philosophy, a knowledge of reality in its basic structure, a study of being as being, Aristotle sometimes terms first philosophy (a.k.a. metaphysics), although he uses the term "philosophy" also for the study of first causes and principles. Moreover, his Physics, to a large extent overlaps with what he defines as first philosophy. Now, of course, little of what Aristotle wrote on the natural and the life sciences is correct; in fact, the high esteem that Aristotle's works had in the middle ages was blamed for delaying the development of modern science. Whether what he says on first philosophy is correct is another question. Although one can ignore his more specific and empirical works as irrelevant to his philosophical views, there is no obvious starting point in expounding Aristotle's philosophy, since it all hangs together as an organic unity. A key to understanding Aristotelian philosophy is its central assumption that language reflects reality, in his case Greek; an analysis of linguistic categories gives access to ontology, the way things really are.
As a speech communication major, the communicative theory of reality, which has evolved from portions of Aristotle's work peeled away from his natural and life science errors, makes alot of sense for me personally. Language and perception always have the last say in what is real. I know some will give less than two s**ts about that.
I'm way off the reservation on both sides of the central theme of this thread so I'll quit. Hope I didn't torture.