Galileo's treatment for the centre of gravity of solids

Abstract

The appendix on the centres of gravity that appears at the end of Galileo's book, Two New Sciences, is analysed. It is shown that the method used by Galileo in this work has an interesting reasoning and also shows preliminary ideas about scaling and advances some ideas about series convergence. In addition, we note that the geometrical language Galileo uses makes its understanding difficult in contemporary terms. © 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd.