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    Archimedes

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    Archimedes (c. 287-212/211 BCE) was an ancient Greek mathematician and inventor from Syracuse, Sicily. He is renowned for discovering the relationship between a sphere's surface area and volume and its circumscribing cylinder. He also formulated Archimedes' principle of buoyancy and invented the screw pump still used today to raise water. When the Romans besieged Syracuse, Archimedes helped defend the city through ingenious war machines until it eventually fell and he was killed.

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    Archimedes

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    Archimedes (c. 287-212/211 BCE) was an ancient Greek mathematician and inventor from Syracuse, Sicily. He is renowned for discovering the relationship between a sphere's surface area and volume and its circumscribing cylinder. He also formulated Archimedes' principle of buoyancy and invented the screw pump still used today to raise water. When the Romans besieged Syracuse, Archimedes helped defend the city through ingenious war machines until it eventually fell and he was killed.

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    Archimedes (c. 287-212/211 BCE) was an ancient Greek mathematician and inventor from Syracuse, Sicily. He is renowned for discovering the relationship between a sphere's surface area and volume and its circumscribing cylinder. He also formulated Archimedes' principle of buoyancy and invented the screw pump still used today to raise water. When the Romans besieged Syracuse, Archimedes helped defend the city through ingenious war machines until it eventually fell and he was killed.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    23 views2 pages

    Archimedes

    Uploaded by

    Educ Series
    Archimedes (c. 287-212/211 BCE) was an ancient Greek mathematician and inventor from Syracuse, Sicily. He is renowned for discovering the relationship between a sphere's surface area and volume and its circumscribing cylinder. He also formulated Archimedes' principle of buoyancy and invented the screw pump still used today to raise water. When the Romans besieged Syracuse, Archimedes helped defend the city through ingenious war machines until it eventually fell and he was killed.

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    Archimedes, (born c.

    287 BCE, Syracuse, Sicily [Italy]—died 212/211 BCE, Syracuse),


    the most famous mathematician and inventor in ancient Greece. Archimedes is
    especially important for his discovery of the relation between the surface and volume of
    a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder. He is known for his formulation of
    a hydrostatic principle (known as Archimedes’ principle) and a device for raising water,
    still used, known as the Archimedes screw.
    His life
    Archimedes probably spent some time in Egypt early in his career, but he resided for
    most of his life in Syracuse, the principal Greek city-state in Sicily, where he was
    on intimate terms with its king, Hieron II. Archimedes published his works in the form
    of correspondence with the principal mathematicians of his time, including the
    Alexandrian scholars Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene. He played an
    important role in the defense of Syracuse against the siege laid by the Romans in
    213 BCE by constructing war machines so effective that they long delayed the capture of
    the city. When Syracuse eventually fell to the Roman general Marcus Claudius
    Marcellus in the autumn of 212 or spring of 211 BCE, Archimedes was killed in the sack of
    the city.

    Study how turning a helix enclosed in a circular pipe raises water in an Archimedes screw
    See all videos for this article
    Far more details survive about the life of Archimedes than about any other ancient
    scientist, but they are largely anecdotal, reflecting the impression that his mechanical
    genius made on the popular imagination. Thus, he is credited with inventing the
    Archimedes screw, and he is supposed to have made two “spheres” that Marcellus took
    back to Rome—one a star globe and the other a device (the details of which are
    uncertain) for mechanically representing the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and
    the 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 that has him
    leaping from the bath in which he supposedly got the idea and running naked through
    the streets shouting “Heurēka!” (“I have found it!”) is popular embellishment.
    Equally apocryphal are the stories that he used a huge 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—although all are popular reflections of his real interest
    in catoptrics (the branch of optics dealing with the reflection of light from mirrors, plane
    or curved), mechanics, and pure mathematics.

    According to Plutarch (c. 46–119 CE), Archimedes had so low an opinion of the kind of


    practical invention at which he excelled and to which he owed his contemporary fame
    that he left no written work on such subjects. While it is true that—apart from a dubious
    reference to a treatise, “On Sphere-Making”—all of his known works were of a
    theoretical character, his interest in mechanics nevertheless deeply influenced his
    mathematical thinking. Not only did he write works on theoretical mechanics and
    hydrostatics, but his treatise Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems shows that he
    used mechanical reasoning as a heuristic device for the discovery of new mathematical
    theorems.

    Reference: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Archimedes

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