Did Archimedes solve combinatorics problems thousands of years ago?

A fascinating story of the discovery of mathematician Archimedes lost manuscript, and the clever solution and translation. Archimedes has been a favorite figure of mine since grade school. Here’s an interesting story of coincidences and sleuthing, discovering that Archimedes was toying with the field of “combinatorics,” a field never really fleshed out until the dawn of computer science mathematics. In Archimedes’ Puzzle, a New Eureka Moment. “A historian of mathematics appears to have solved the mystery of a treatise written 2,200 years ago by Archimedes.” By Gina Kolata. in the New York Times: NYT HomePage

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.