Spurious theorems in Archimedes' \textit{Equilibrium of Planes}: Book I (Q1238789)

Archimedes of Syracuse is known today as the greatest mathematician the ancient world produced, but in the centuries after his death in 212 B.C. he was often cited for his inventions of ingenious mechanical devices and his investigations concerning centres of gravity. In this paper the author examines one of Archimedes' extant writings on this latter topic and argues that the present format of Book I of \textit{Equilibrium of Planes} is not that given it by Archimedes. In particular the author claims that among the spurious theorems in this work are the first three, the eleventh and twelfth, and very likely the sixth and seventh (containing the famous law of the lever for commensurable and incommensurable magnitudes respectively). He also argues that Axioms Two and Three were not in the work Archimedes wrote, and that what remains, is a very elegant, short work of Archimedes, containing eight propositions that do just enough to find the centre of gravity of a triangle and, as a corollary, a trapezoid. The arguments for making so many excisions from the text established by Heiberg are partly linguistic, but mainly revolve around the fact that the suspect propositions are trivial and lead nowhere. As an example the author cites Proposition Eleven. Although it is a special case of Axiom Five the proof occupies twenty-one lines, and this, he argues, is not Archimedes' style. The paper concludes with a discussion of Archimedes' contributions to the development of the barycentric theory. The author discusses the views of E. J. Dijksterhuis and A. G. Drachmann, the former arguing that Archimedes did not invent the concept of centre of gravity and the latter arguing that he did. The author's main point here is that existing texts give no grounds for a decisive resolution of this controversy, although if his claim that the law of the lever had been established mathematically before Archimedes wrote is correct then there must have been at least a pre-Archimedean theory of equilibrium if not a theory of centres of gravity.