Archimedes, the most famous mathematician and inventor in ancient Greece (born c. 287 bce, Syracuse, Sicily [Italy]—died 212/211 bce, Syracuse). Archimedes is famous for discovering the relationship between the surface and volume of a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder.
He is most known for developing a hydrostatic principle (known as Archimedes’ principle) and the Archimedes screw, a device for lifting water that is still in use today.
Who is Archimedes?
Archimedes most likely spent some time in Egypt early in his career, but he spent the majority of his life in Syracuse, the primary Greek city-state in Sicily, where he was close to the monarch, Hieron II. Archimedes’ works were published through correspondence with the major mathematicians of his time, including the Alexandrian scholars Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene.
He was instrumental in defending Syracuse against the Roman siege in 213 bce by building war equipment that was so effective that the capture of the city was delayed for a long time. Archimedes was murdered in the sack of Syracuse by the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus in the autumn of 212 or the spring of 211 bce.
There exist far more information concerning Archimedes’ life than any other ancient scientist, but they are mostly anecdotal, reflecting the impression that his mechanical genius left on the general imagination. As a result, he is credited with creating the Archimedes screw, and he is said to have created two “spheres” that Marcellus brought back to Rome—one a star globe and the other a device (the details of which are unknown) for mechanically simulating the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets.
The story that he determined the proportion of gold and silver in a wreath made for Hieron by weighing it in water is probably true, but the version in which he leaps from the bath where he allegedly got the idea and runs naked through the streets shouting “Heurka!” (“I have found it!”) is a popular embellishment.
Similarly fanciful are the stories that he used a massive array of mirrors to burn the Roman ships besieging Syracuse, that he said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth,” and that a Roman soldier killed him because he refused to leave his mathematical diagrams—all popular reflections of his true interest in catoptrics (the branch of optics concerned with the reflection of light).
Plutarch (c. 46-119 ce) claims that Archimedes had such a poor opinion of the kind of practical invention at which he excelled and owed his contemporary reputation that he left no written work on such matters. While it is true that, with the exception of a doubtful reference to a treatise, “On Sphere-Making,” all of his known publications were theoretical in nature, his interest in mechanics nonetheless had a profound influence on his mathematical thinking.
He not only wrote works on theoretical mechanics and hydrostatics, but his treatise Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems demonstrates how he employed mechanical reasoning as a heuristic mechanism for discovering new mathematical theorems.
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
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Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
