Archimedes's story
ARCHIMEDES
ARCHIMEDES
Born in 287 B.C. in Syracuse, Greece Archimedes is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He is also famed for his invention and for the colorful ways he is believed to have made them.
Little is known about Archimedes's life. He was the son of an astronomer (someone who studies outer space, such as the stars) named Phidias. He may also have been related to Hieron, King have been of Syracuse, and his son Gelon. Archimedes studied in the learning capital of Alexandria, Egypt, at the school that had been established by the Greek mathematician Euclid (third century B.C.E.) . He later returned to live in his native city of Syracuse.
There are various stores about how Archimedes made his discoveries. A famous one tells hoe he uncovered a attempt to cheat king Hieron. The king ordered a golden crown and gave the crown's maker the exact amount of gold needed. The maker delivered a crown of the required weight, but Hieron suspected that some silver had been used instead of gold. He asked Archimedes to think about the matter. One day Archimedes was considering it while he was getting into a bathtub. He noticed that the amount of water overflowing the tub was proportional (related consistently) to the amount of his body that was being immersed (covered by water). This gave him an idea for solving the problems of the crown. He was so thrilled that he ran naked through the streets shouting, "Eureka!"(Greek for "I have discovered it!").
There a several ways Archimedes may have determined the amount of silver in the crown. One likely method relies on an idea that is now called Archimedes's principle. It sates that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up (pushed up) by a force that is equal to the weight of fluid that is displaced (pushed out of place) by the body. Using this method, he would have first taken two equal weights of gold and silver and compared them when immersed in water. Next, he would have compared the weight of the crown and equal weight of pure silver in water in the same way. The difference between these two comparisons would indicate that the crown was not pure gold.
Archimedes also studied aspects of the lever and pulley. A lever is a kind of basic machine in which a bat is used to raise or move a weight, while a pulley uses a wheel and a rope or chain to lift loads. Such mechanical investigations wold help Archimedes assist in defending Syracuse when it came under attack.
According to the Greek biographer Plutarch (46 B.C.-120 B.C.) Archimedes's military inventions helped defined his home city when it was attacked by Roman forces. Plutarch wrote that after Hieron died, the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus (268 B.C.-208 B.C.) attacked Syracuse through land and sea. According to Plutarch Archimedes's catapults (machine that could hurl objects such as heavy stones) forced back the Roman forces on land. Later writers claimed that Archimedes also set the Roman ships on fire by focusing an arrangement of mirrors on them. Nevertheless, despite Archimedes's effort, Syracuse eventually surrendered to the Romans. Archimedes was killed after the city was taken, although it is not exactly known how this occurred.
Perhaps while in Egypt, Archimedes invited the water screw, a machine for raising water to bring it to fields. Another invention was a miniature planetarium, a sphere whose motion imitated that of the earth, sun, moon, and the five planets that were then known to exist.
Euclid's book Elements had included practically all the result of Greek geometry up to Archimedes's time. But Archimedes continued Euclid's work more than anyone before him . One way, he did this was to extends what is known as the "method of exhaustion." This method is used to determines the areas and volumes of figure with curved lines and surfaces, such as circles, spheres, pyramids, and cones. Archimedes investigation of the method of exhaustion helped lead to the current from of mathematics called integral calculus. Although his method is now outdated, the advances that finally outdated it did not occur until about two thousands years after Archimedes lived.
Archimedes also came closer than anyone had before him to determine the value of pi, or the number that gives the ratio (relation) of a circle's circumference (its boundary line) to its diameter (the length of a line passing through its center). In his work The Sand Reckoner, he created a new way to show very large numbers. Before this, numbers had been represented by letters of the alphabets, a method that had been very limited.
He passed away in 21 B.C.
ARCHIMEDES'S PRINCIPLE
BIOGRAPHY OF ARCHIMEDES
Archimedes
Description
Fields: Mathematics; Physics; Engineering; Astronomy; Mechanics
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