Opening The Sand-Reckoner and Shorter Works — Archimedes in Plato Scroll… Continue →
Archimedes · Claude AI
Some people think, King Gelon, that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude: I mean not only the sand around Syracuse and the rest of Sicily, but also the sand in every land, inhabited and uninhabited alike. And there are others who do not take it to be infinite, yet hold that no number has been named so great as to exceed its multitude. It is clear that if those who are of this opinion were to conceive a volume of sand as large as the volume of the earth, with all the seas in it and the hollows of the earth filled up to a height equal to the highest of the mountains, they would be many times less able to see that any number could be stated which exceeds the multitude of that sand. But I shall try to show you, by geometrical demonstrations which you will follow, that among the numbers named by us and published in the writings addressed to Zeuxippus there are some that exceed not …
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