Editing Centroid (section)

== History ==
The term "centroid" was coined in 1814.<ref>{{Google books|D1JFAAAAcAAJ|Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London|pg=PA375|keywords="centroid"}}</ref> It is used as a substitute for the older terms "center of gravity" and "[[center of mass]]" when the purely geometrical aspects of that point are to be emphasized. The term is peculiar to the English language; French, for instance, uses "{{lang|fr|centre de gravité}}" on most occasions, and other languages use terms of similar meaning.{{cn|date=June 2023}}

The center of gravity, as the name indicates, is a notion that arose in mechanics, most likely in connection with building activities. It is uncertain when the idea first appeared, as the concept likely occurred to many people individually with minor differences. Nonetheless, the center of gravity of figures was studied extensively in Antiquity; [[Charles Bossut|Bossut]] credits [[Archimedes]] (287–212 BCE) with being the first to find the centroid of plane figures, although he never defines it.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Court|first=Nathan Altshiller|date=1960| title=Notes on the centroid|journal=The Mathematics Teacher|volume=53|issue=1|pages=33–35|doi=10.5951/MT.53.1.0033| jstor=27956057}}</ref> A treatment of centroids of solids by Archimedes has been lost.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Knorr |first=W. |date=1978 |title=Archimedes' lost treatise on the centers of gravity of solids |url=https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03023072 |journal=The Mathematical Intelligencer |language=en |volume=1 |issue=2 |pages=102–109 |doi=10.1007/BF03023072 |s2cid=122021219 |issn=0343-6993}}</ref>

It is unlikely that Archimedes learned the theorem that the medians of a triangle meet in a point—the center of gravity of the triangle—directly from [[Euclid]], as this proposition is not in the ''[[Euclid's Elements|Elements]]''. The first explicit statement of this proposition is due to [[Hero of Alexandria|Heron of Alexandria]] (perhaps the first century CE) and occurs in his ''Mechanics''. It may be added, in passing, that the proposition did not become common in the textbooks on plane geometry until the nineteenth century.{{cn|date=June 2023}}