Archimedes

Born: c. 287 BC in Syracuse, Sicily Died: c. 212 BC (at about age 75) in Syracuse, Sicily Nationality: Greek Famous For: Accurate calculation for pi Archimedes was a great mathematician born in Syracuse, Sicily, Italy, in 287 BC. He is revered as one of the three Archimedes’ Family Life Archimedes’ father, Phidias, was an astronomer of some note, and his family was well off. Therefore, Archimedes was able to become an accomplished musician and poet, and he maintained a lifelong interest in astronomy. Because of his position, Archimedes was able to travel to Alexandria, Egypt, for his formal education. By all reports, he was thrilled with the lofty intellectual exchanges he had there. Upon completing his studies, he returned to Syracuse to help with his family and to work for King Hiero II as an engineer inventing machines of war and improving the designs of existing ones (most notably the catapult). Archimedes’ Contribution to Mathematics On his own, Archimedes continued to study geometry and science and the principles of mechanics and made such major contributions to these disciplines as an understanding of specific gravity, hydrostatics, and buoyancy along with ingenious everyday applications of the use of the lever and the pulley. He created formulations for such mathematical accomplishments as a formula to measure the area of a circle. This was done using a system he created called using infinitesimals. This is quite similar to modern day integral calculus. Archimedes ...

Archimedes of Syracuse Archimedes was born in the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 287 BC. He was the son of an astronomer and mathematician named Phidias. Aside from that, very little is known about the early life of Archimedes or his family. Some maintain that he belonged to the nobility of Syracuse, and that his family was in some way related to that of Hiero II, King of Syracuse. In the third century BC, Syracuse was a hub of commerce, art and science. As a youth in Syracuse Archimedes developed his natural curiosity and penchant for problem solving. When he had learned as much as he could from his teachers, Archimedes traveled to Egypt in order to study in Alexandria. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, Alexandria had, by Archimedes' time, earned a reputation for great learning and scholarship. Euclid was one of the most well-known scholars who lived in Alexandria prior to Archimedes' arrival in the city. Euclid was a renowned mathematician, perhaps best remembered for collecting all of the existent Greek geometrical treatises and assembling them in a logical and systematic order in his book, “The Elements.” This compilation was fundamental to the study of geometry for over 2,000 years, and undoubtedly influenced the work of Archimedes. After his studies in Alexandria, Archimedes returned to Syracuse and pursued a life of thought and invention. Many apocryphal legends record how Archimedes endeared himself to King Hiero II, discovering solutions to pr...

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Archimedes, a Greek who lived in the Sicilian port of Syracuse in the third century BC, was an ingenious inventor, best known for shouting “Eureka!” after inspiration struck. When Archimedes’ hometown was attacked by the Roman army and navy in 215 BC, the old inventor designed a number of war machines to fight back. Archimedes’ devices at the siege of Syracuse soon became legendary, and were chronicled by later historians Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch. How Archimedes Defended the Walls of Syracuse According to the historians, the Romans at Syracuse were repelled by a wide variety of clever devices. Archimedes had prepared large catapults for flinging stones of several hundred pounds to repel the attackers from a distance, and smaller, short-range engines for when they managed to get closer. Into the walls Archimedes had cut a number of arrow-loops through which archers and “small scorpions,” small missile-engines possibly like crude crossbows, shot at the Romans. Moreover, Archimedes had built contraptions into the walls themselves: these were great beams that would remain hidden until swinging out over the top of the walls and dropping heavy stones or grappling hooks onto any attackers that got too close. Archimedes Destroys Roman Ships The deluge of missiles from the city’s catapults also kept Roman ships at bay. But even when the Romans tried to sneak their ships to the city walls at night, shots from the arrow-loops decimated the sailors, while stones dropped from the w...

In one of his books, Ψαμμιτης ( Psammites), or The Sand-Reckoner, Archimedes attempted to measure the size of the universe by calculating the number of the grains of sand necessary to fill the cosmos (sphere of the fixed stars). That number turned out to be a huge one: something like 10 to the 63 power. Archimedes correctly measured the angle of seeing the sun in the sky: 32 to 27 sixtieths of a degree. "The diameter of the sun," he said in The Sand-Reckoner, "is about 30 times greater than the diameter of the moon and not greater.... [T]he diameter of the sun is greater than the side of the chiliagon [a thousand-sided polygon] inscribed in the greatest circle in the [sphere of the] universe." Archimedes was the greatest Greek mathematician of the ancient world and, with little doubt, the greatest scientist who ever lived. He was born in Syracuse, Sicily, in 287 B.C.E. He was also a philosopher, an astronomer, a physicist, an engineer and an inventor. In fact, like Aristotle before him, he set the foundations of Greek and Western science. In a metaphorical sense, all Western science is a series of footnotes to Archimedes. The importance of the role played by Archimedes in the history of science can scarcely be exaggerated. He was emulated and admired in his own day and at successive periods in later times. His name appears on the pages of the works of the great figures that fashioned the beginnings of modern mechanics.... Galileo mentions Archimedes by actual count over on...