this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Tbh, I want my memes with sources. and this one is strange...
https://civilizationchronicles.com/roman-engineering-and-mathematics/ claims that mathmatics were essensial to roman engineering.
whereas this (only abstract avaliable...) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-66494-0_25 claim that mathmatics were but an auxillary science? ๐ค
nontheless mathmatics seems to have been quite understood and used by the roman engineers building among other things, aqueducts
Calculus is a specific field of mathematics, mostly to do with limits, integrals and derivatives. Those all feature very heavily in working out loads and stresses.
But it's unfair to say the Roman didn't have calculus. It wasn't formal calculus, but they absolutely had mathematics, and the Greeks worked out the exhaustion method a century before the Via Appia was even started.
You don't need calculus to do some very impressive building, you can go very very far with experience, rules of thumb and basic maths. Hell, ask any civil engineer and they'll gladly show you some common formula that makes physicists cry.
Do you happen to know any civil engineers, I would like to see these formulas
when we approximate g to 10 they weep.