Archimedean

When he carves the peel of an apple into “a perfect Archimedean spiral,” finding a “sense of order and well-being” in “the ever-growing distance of the peel from the core,” you can’t help applauding.

“Imagine the equation, or picture the graph, of the Archimedean spiral,” Serpell, a Harvard English professor, writes in the novel’s closing paragraph.

Anthropologist Lisa Messeri, who has studied how astronomers turn data into worlds, says this imagined, distant location is an Archimedean point—that is, a point far enough away to offer a different, perhaps more objective or truer perspective.

It’s a bit of collateral resonance, then, that by imagining viewing the Earth from an Archimedean point, astronomers move the Earth, too, if the Earth is the world from which we view the cosmos.

Thus the Scientific Revolution recuperated the lost sciences of Aristotelian biology and Archimedean mathematics; but very quickly it moved away from its sources: Harvey had no followers who claimed, as he did, to be true Aristotelians, and Galileo had no followers who claimed, as he did, to be disciples of Archimedes.