rheumatoid arithmetic

Much of what is known about Archimedes and his work was revealed and explained in a fascinating programme on Radio 4 yesterday. The programme series - "In Our Time" - is one of the highlights of my week. It is invariably thought-provoking, and often so interesting and challenging that I can't even do the washing-up at the same time as listening to it.

The two things most people know about Archimedes are - he ran naked from his bath into the street shouting "Eureka (I have found it!)", and that he was a Greek. Sadly, neither are true - there is no evidence that he ever appeared in public without his clothes, and he was born on the island of Sicily and probably never went near Greece (or what passed for it in 250BCE).

Less commonly known is that he is one of the greatest mathematicians ever to live, and that nearly two & a half thousand years ago he was successfully working on problems that remain of interest to mathematicians today (he calculated a value for pi /π (see * below) that wasn't bettered for 800 years, and laid the foundations for the calculus).

Top and bottom of it is he was a bloody clever human - one of the smartest ever.... and one of the smartest things he did was to invent a way of getting at fundamental logical truths called "proof by contradiction" - that is -

if you think something is true, but one thing happens that contradicts that truth, then your "truth" isn't true...

Doesn't sound like much, but it was revolutionary in its time and is still one of the main ways in which mathematicians and philosophers prove things.

What (you might be asking yourself) has this got to do with arthritis? - I have had three days in succession virtually free from pain, stiffness and fatigue. I could be turning the corner (I thought - and so did my rheumatologist when I saw her this week), maybe I can go back to work after all? Today however my arthritis is worse than it has been for months - feet, ankles, knees, shoulders, upper arm muscles, elbows, wrists, hands, jaw and neck, all stiff and throbbing (no sniggering at the back please). That proves I ain't better yet - it's just this stupid disease playing with me. QED

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Up until next Thursday, 9:00am you can listen to "In Our Time - Archimedes" here

* Pi or π - is the number, 3.142 (approx) that is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The reason why pi has always fascinated people is that a) you can't calculate an exact value for it, and b) it pops up in the strangest places - it saved Dr Who's life, you can tune pianos with it, Kate Bush and the Stone Roses have both recorded songs about it, and as if that weren't enough - descriptions of just about everything in nature depend upon it..........

animation showing how pi is calculated, ripped from wikipedia