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Archimedes: 3 puzzles worth knowing

3 puzzles from Archimedes, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• The Cattle of the Sun: a 2,000-year-old poem hides a monstrous number

  A Greek epigram attributed to Archimedes describes the Sun god's cattle grazing on Sicily in four colors — white, black, yellow, and dappled bulls and cows — and lays out a set of …

  — Archimedes (attributed), Archimedes's cattle problem

• Archimedes' Stomachion

  Archimedes designed a square dissected into 14 oddly-shaped flat pieces, a sort of ancient tangram. He then asked a purely combinatorial question that had nothing to do with pictur…

  — Archimedes, Ostomachion (fragmentary text, via the Archimedes Palimpsest)

• Archimedes named a number big enough to count every grain of sand in the universe

  Ancient Greeks had no word for a number larger than a 'myriad myriad' (100 million) -- anything bigger was simply 'uncountable.' So when someone claimed the sand needed to fill the…

  — Archimedes, The Sand Reckoner

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