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Re: historical question



Larry,
Newton solved the problem of the precession of the Earth's axis
which is a rotational problem. One of the problems with finding
historically when something was first done and being able to recognize the
solution are two vastly different things. One of my favorites along this
line is Carnot's discovery of his cycle when the conservation of energy was
still decades away. Maxwell and his predecessors did found there equations
without the help of vectors. You just do it one coordinate at a time, being
very carful when coordinates interact.
As a friend of mine likes to put it hindsight is twenty twenty.
Much of the advanced derivations we used were done long after the
principles were known. The newer derivations just make the principles
involved clearer.
Gary

At 04:15 PM 11/9/2004 -0700, you wrote:
Did Newton do much with rotating rigid bodies (torque, angular momentum,
moment of inertia, etc.), or were those later developments? If later, who
were the leading lights in the explication of the mechanics of rotating
rigid bodies? The cross product hadn't been invented in Newton's day. Or
maybe torque goes back to Archimedes and his levers. One web site
(http://astron.berkeley.edu/~jrg/ay202/node63.html) attributes the
rotational version of N2 to Euler.

Thanks,
Larry