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Archimedes of Syracuse, c. 287 - 212 B.C., mathematician, physicist and engineer.

Archimedes is one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He became a popular figure as a result of his involvement in the defense of Syracuse against the Roman siege in the first and second punic wars. He is reputed to have held the Romans at bay single-handedly with war engines of his design; to have been able to move a full-size ship complete with crew and cargo by pulling a single rope; to have discovered the principle of buoyancy while taking a bath, taking to the streets naked calling "eureka" (I found it!); and to have invented the irrigation device known as Archimedes' screw.

In terms of creativity and insight, he exceeds any other mathematician prior to the European renaissance. In a civilization with an awkward number system and a language in which "a myriad" (literally ten thousand) meant "infinity", he invented a positional number system and used it to write numbers up to 10. He devised a heuristic method based on statics to do private calculation that we would classify today as integral calculus, but then presented rigorous geometric proofs for his results. To what extent he actually had a correct version of integral calculus is debatable. He proved that the ratio of a circle's perimeter to its diameter is the same as the ratio of the circle's area to the square of the radius. He did not call this ratio π but he gave a procedure to approximate it to arbitrary accuracy and gave an approximation of it as "exceeding 3 in less than 1/7 but more than 10/71". He was the first, and possibly the only, greek mathematician to introduce mechanical curves (those traced by a moving point) as legitimate objects of study, and used Archimedes' spiral to square the circle. He proved that the area enclosed by a parabola and a straight line is 4/3 the area of a triangle with equal base and height. He proved that the area and volume of the sphere are in the same ratio to the area and volume of a circumscribed straight cylinder, a result he was so proud of that he made it his epitaph.

Archimedes is probably also the first mathematical physicist on record, and the best before Galileo and Newton. He invented the field of statics, enunciated the law of the lever, the law of equilibrium of fluids and the law of buoyancy. He gave the equilibrium positions of floating sections of paraboloids as a function of their height, base area and density using only greek geometry, a feat that would be taxing to a modern physicist using calculus.

Archimedes' works were not very influential, even in antiquity. He and his contemporaries probably constitute the peak of greek mathematical rigour. Many of his works were lost when the library of Alexandria was destroyed and survived only in latin or arabic translations. During the middle ages the mathematicians who could understand Archimedes' work were few and far between. Also, his "method" was lost until around 1900, after the arithmetization of analysis had been carried out successfully. We can only speculate about the effect that the "method" would have had on the development of calculus had it been known in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Archimedes' works

Archimedes' life

Draft. Some of the obvious things here include:

• The "Eureka" thing
• Archimedes' screw
• The principle of the lever
• The buoyancy principle
• Machines invented for the defense of Syracuse
• Books written
• Some info on π.

External links:

• Archimedes Home Page
• MacTutor biography of Archimedes