Archimedes

About this figure

Archimedes was born around 287 BCE in the Greek city of Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, said to be the son of an astronomer named Phidias. He is thought to have studied for a time in Alexandria, then the leading center of Greek scholarship, where he formed connections with mathematicians there that he maintained by letter for the rest of his life, but he spent most of his career back in his native Syracuse. Few reliable personal details about him survive beyond a handful of anecdotes recorded generations later by writers such as Plutarch and Vitruvius, and modern accounts of his life necessarily rely heavily on these secondhand and sometimes embellished sources.

His surviving mathematical works, including treatises on the measurement of the circle, the sphere and cylinder, and the areas and volumes of various curved figures, show a command of what amounts to early integral calculus, using a rigorous method of exhaustion to calculate areas and volumes that would not be matched in sophistication for nearly two thousand years. He is also credited with foundational contributions to statics and hydrostatics, including the principle that a body immersed in fluid displaces its own volume, traditionally associated with the story of his shouting "Eureka" after realizing it in his bath. During the Roman siege of Syracuse in the Second Punic War, Archimedes is said to have designed defensive war machines, including devices for hurling projectiles, that helped delay the city's capture.

When Syracuse finally fell in 212 BCE, Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier, according to tradition while absorbed in a geometric diagram drawn in sand, despite orders from the Roman general Marcellus that he be spared. He is said to have asked that a sphere inscribed within a cylinder be placed on his tomb, commemorating what he considered his most significant discovery, the ratio between the volumes of those two solids.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.