Detail of a painting by Jusepe Ribera (1591 - 1652) ARCHIMEDES : Greek mathematician (Syracuse 287 to 212 B.C.)

Son of Pheidias, the astronomer who calculated the relative dimensions of the sun and the moon, Archimedes grew up in Alexandria where he became a student of Euclid. Most importantly, in On the measurement of the circle, he gives us a method of calculating P with absolute precision. Using 96 sided polygons, he gives a value of between 22/7 and 223/71. In his books On the sphere and On the cylinder, he discovers the ratio between the volumes of solids. In the Sandreckoner, he looked for a way to calculate how many grains of sand it would take to fill the universe, as he believed it to be. To present numbers of such enormity he introduced exponents into the Greek numerical system that had up to that time only used letters. He discovered formulae for the addition and subtraction of arcs, theorems for calculating the area of a parabolic segment, that of the spiral that now carries his name, as well as that of the cylinder and the sphere, etc. His research into tangents and quadrants led him to imagine, two thousand years before his time, elements of differential and integral calculus.

It is however his discoveries in the field of mechanics that have lead to his universal fame. In his first book, On the equilibrium of planes, he analyzed the theory of the lever, only requiring " one pressure point to move the world ". He foresaw the helix, invented the archimedean screw, the running or pulley block and the cog wheel.

He defined statics and hydrostatics and established their fundamental laws in his On floating bodies. It was due to his discovery of this now famous principle that he is reputed to have leapt from his bath and run naked through the streets shouting in his euphoria " Eureka ! Eureka ! ".

Finally, at over 70 years of age, he was instrumental in the defense of Syracuse when the city was besieged by Rome. It was thanks to machines that Archimedes had invented that Marcellus' besieging army was held outside the city for more than three years. When the city finally fell, despite Marcellus giving orders that this great man should not be harmed, he was killed by a drunken Roman soldier who failed to recognize who he was.

Alan Mathison Turing TURING, Alan Mathison (1912-1954)

British mathematician and logician, inventor of the Turing machine. Born in London, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton Universities. In 1936, when he was still a student, he published an article the automation of calculations, and introduced the concept of a theoretical calculation machine, the Turing machine. The concept of this machine was that it could, in theory, carry out all mathematical calculations, which was an outstanding advance in the evolution of digital calculation. Turing extended his mathematical researches to the study of artificial intelligence. He suggested a method, the Turing test, to determine if machines could become capable of thought. During the Second World War, Turing worked as a cryptographer for the British Foreign Office. His death through the ingestion of poison remains a mystery.

 The artificial intelligence

That branch an information technology process dealing with the way in which computers can reproduce some of the aspects of human intelligence, such as, speech recognition, deduction, inference, creative response, ability to learn from past experience and to make a reasonable deduction from a set of incomplete data. Artificial intelligence is a complex area, covering an understanding of thought processes as well as the reproduction of these processes by programs. Some tasks, once considered as arduous, Chess, in particular, turned out to be quite simple, whilst others, initially considered to be quite easy, such as speech recognition, are now considered as extremely difficult. In resolving problems, human expertise uses a combination of factual knowledge and reason. This is also the case in an expert system, however these two elements are contained in separate components, the knowledge base and the inference engine. The knowledge base supplies specific facts and the sequencing rules, whilst the inference engine supplies the reasoning that enables conclusions to be drawn. 

Appearing in the 1960’s, expert systems are used mathematics, chemistry, geology, and medicine, as well as in the banking and insurance sectors.

  The PROTEUS engine

Over the last ten years, Novosoft International engineers have been developing the PROTEUS engine, using the latest research into artificial intelligence. Capable of carrying out more than one billion operations per second, the PROTEUS évolution 22, that is the heartbeat of ARCHIMEDES EXCELLIUM 2022 is a phenomenal solutions tool.