Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.
— Archimedes, according to Pappus of Alexandria (fourth century)
Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) lived in Syracuse, a Greek city on the island of Sicily, and was the greatest mathematician of antiquity. He computed π with a method that was used for almost two thousand years, found the area of the parabola by adding up infinitely many triangles, discovered that the sphere fills exactly two thirds of the cylinder that encloses it, and wrote the first mathematical laws of physics: that of the lever and that of floating bodies.
At the same time, he was the king’s engineer. His machines held the Roman army before the walls of Syracuse for two years. When the city fell, in 212 BC, a soldier killed him, according to tradition, while he was drawing figures in the sand.
Many of his ideas were almost lost. One of his most important books, The Method, only reappeared in 1906, scraped off and covered by the prayers of a medieval prayer book.
In this trail we tell Archimedes’s life and redo, with the calculations in plain view, ten of his ideas.
Who he was
Archimedes
- Nascimento
- c. 287 BC, Syracuse
- Morte
- 212 BC, Syracuse
- Origem
- Syracuse, Greek Sicily (now Italy)
- Áreas
- Geometry, mechanics, hydrostatics, engineering
Reading guide
Biography
Discoveries and proofs
- Eureka: the king’s crown and Archimedes’s principle
- The law of the lever
- The measurement of the circle and the number π
- The quadrature of the parabola
- The sphere and the cylinder
- The Method and the palimpsest
- The spiral of Archimedes
- The Sand Reckoner
- The screw, the claw and the mirrors