All right, class, show of hands: How many people here are familiar with the name Archimedes? Okay, and how many of you have seen the movie Pi multiple times? Ah, same ones. Just as I thought.Well, for those of you who haven't seen Pi, let me tell you the story of Archimedes, the great mathematician of Syracuse. He was there a couple millennia before Donovan McNabb. So one day the king receives gold as a gift, and he asks Archimedes how he can be sure this gift is actually pure gold. He thinks and thinks on this problem nonstop for weeks, and he can't come up with a solution. So his wife tells him he needs to take a break, because in his single-minded attempt to come up with an answer for the king, he's forgotten to bathe, and thus he's stinking up the bedroom.
So Archimedes goes to take a bath, and he notices the water rising as he steps in the tub. Suddenly, it hits him -- displacement, a way to measure volume and, thus, density, which will tell you if that gold is really gold. The light bulbs go off in his head, the angels start singing, and he gets so excited that he screams, "Eureka!", and he runs naked and dripping wet through the streets to the king's palace to share the solution with him.
Why do I share the story of a Greek mathematician in a football history class? Well, when it comes right down to it, John Heisman discovered the forward pass much the same way...
