Re:The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann
by abecedarius on Friday November 15, 2019 @09:32PM
(#21550593)
Some known background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudoxus_of_Cnidus#Mathematics
(A tidbit about that Definition 5 there: I read in Russo that Galileo could not see the point of it. To him a ratio was a concrete thing, a number you got by dividing two other numbers. His civilization, says Russo, had lost the concept of freely invented axiomatic definitions and didn't really recover it till the 19th C.)
I like to think of Archimedes as the first mathematical physicist. Of course Euclidean geometry itself is a physical theory, so there's one ground to disagree.
I guess it's possible that Archimedes invented the integral calculus a hundred generations before Newton and Leibniz because Syracuse was teeming with calculus-like ideas that didn't get written down, and things like the Antikythera Mechanism suggest that there were a lot of important intellectual achievements refined through broad communities of practice that didn't survive. But it seems just as likely to me that Archimedes was just that good.