ARCHIMEDES
OF SYRACUSE
Remembered today primarily for inventing a rudimentary screw
pump, there is so much more to the Ancient Greek polymath
Archimedes of Syracuse, the greatest scientist of antiquity.
“Give me a lever and a
place to stand and I will
move the earth.” These
are supposed to be the
words of the greatest
scientist of antiquity,
and yet, as with so
much about Archimedes of Syracuse,
it is virtually impossible to separate
myth from reality. The legendary flash
of bath-time inspiration – the original
‘eureka’ moment that we were taught
at school – while almost certainly
apocryphal, has passed indelibly into
science folklore. It remains popular as
the only incident of public nudity related
to the history of hydrostatics, and yet
is unlikely to have been the inspiration
for Archimedes’ two-volume treatise
On Floating Bodies. As one biographer,
Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis puts it: “the
overflowing of water from the bath does
not teach anything about the upward
thrust acting on a body immersed
in water.” Today, Archimedes’ legacy
rests on a vague portfolio of ideas: he
anticipated calculus, formulated the
eponymous hydrostatic principle,
developed the design of the screw pump
and devised an approach to determining
π (pi) that was to be used for more than a
thousand years, while one of the bounds
he established for π (22/7) has remained a
universal approximation ever since.
While there is very little in the way
of verifiable historical fact about the
life of Archimedes, there is a wealth of
unsubstantiated and fanciful detail. An
early Arabian biographer claimed that
the ancient Greek mathematician was
Written BY nick smith
Archimedes of Syrac u s e c . 2 8 7 B C – c . 2 1 2 B C
May 2020 / www.theengineer.co.uk 34
12th century Byzantine Greek historian
John Tzetzes is considered reliable
on this point), we can extrapolate that
Archimedes was born in or around the
year 287BC. Because he spent most
of his life in the Greek city-state of
Syracuse (modern Sicily) where he
was a close acquaintance of King Hiero
II, it is assumed that this is also his
birthplace. Historians think he may
have spent his early career in Egypt,
but are more definite on the notion that
Archimedes published his works in the
form of correspondence with leading
mathematicians of the time, including
Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of
Cyrene.
As for his death, the ancient Greek
biographer Plutarch (writing hundreds of
years after the event) says the centurion
that put Archimedes to the sword did
so when the latter refused to leave his
mathematical diagrams to attend a
meeting with the occupying General
Marcus Claudius Marcellus. His last
words have been handed down to us
as Noli turbare circulos meos (‘do not
disturb my circles’), but these are not
mentioned in Plutarch or anywhere else
reliable. Equally apocryphal, according
to Encyclopaedia Britannica, is the story
that Archimedes used a huge array
of mirrors to burn the Roman ships
besieging Syracuse. Britannica also
questions the historical reliability of his
two most famous quotations about levers
and displaced bathwater, while admitting
that this assortment of unsubstantiated
anecdotes creates a picture of “his real
interest in catoptrics (the branch of
L ate, great engineers
the son of Pythagoras, and there are claims he was a pupil of
Plato. Both positions can be dismissed easily, but the fact that
they routinely make their way into modern discussions about
Archimedes seems to amplify the point that biographical facts
about him are scarce. But what we do know about the man
described by the author of A Contextual History of Mathematics
as the “most original and profound mathematician of antiquity”,
is that there are today nine extant treatises by Archimedes,
covering subjects such as On the Sphere and Cylinder, On the
Equilibrium of Planes, Quadrature of the Parabola, Method
concerning Mechanical Theorems and more besides.
There are some biographical facts that have gained
consensus with historians. Because we know that Archimedes
died during the sack of Syracuse in the Second Punic War
(placing his death at c.212BC), and because we know that he
was 75 years old when he was killed by a Roman centurion (the
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