If Archimedes Had a Computer:
Why Ships, Icebergs and Buildings Tilt and Capsize
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Chris Rorres
School of Veterinary Medicine
University of Pennsylvania
and
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Drexel University
10:30 a.m., Red Auditorium
According to legend, Archimedes ran naked through the streets of ancient Syracuse shouting “Eureka!” after discovering his famous Law of Buoyancy. He illustrated this law in his work On Floating Bodies, which became the foundation of modern shipbuilding. However, with the limited geometric tools of his day Archimedes could only consider certain types of floating bodies.
Twenty-three centuries later, Archimedes’ seminal work has been brought into the 21st century using advanced computing and graphics systems and applied to new phenomena. What happens to a building, for example, when the soil under it liquefies during an earthquake? Or when a slowly melting iceberg suddenly destabilizes? Such drastic phenomena are now studied in Catastrophe Theory, a field Archimedes could have begun if he had had a computer.
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For more information, call Kum J. Ham at 301-975-4203. Colloquia are videotaped and available in the NIST Research Library.