Archimedes of Syracuse
Native spelling: Ἀρχιμήδης
287 BCE–212 BCE, Syracuse, Sicily, Syracuse, Sicily
Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer of Syracuse who computed areas and volumes of curved figures with a rigorous method of exhaustion that anticipated integral calculus by nearly two thousand years, and founded statics and hydrostatics.
Born around 287 BCE in Syracuse, a Greek city-state on Sicily — in modern-day Italy — Archimedes was the son of the astronomer Phidias and, according to Plutarch, related to the ruling house of King Hiero II. He is reported to have studied for a time in Alexandria, then the intellectual center of the Hellenistic world, where he kept up a lifelong correspondence with mathematicians there, including Eratosthenes and Conon of Samos, before returning to Syracuse for the rest of his life.
Archimedes' mathematical work extended and rigorized ideas that would not be matched in generality until the calculus of Newton and Leibniz nearly two millennia later. Using a method of exhaustion inherited from Eudoxus, he proved that the volume and surface area of a sphere are two-thirds those of its circumscribing cylinder — a result he considered his finest and asked to have marked on his tomb with a sphere and cylinder — and computed the area under a parabolic segment, the properties of the spiral that bears his name, and bounds on the value of pi (between 3 + 10/71 and 3 + 1/7) by inscribing and circumscribing 96-sided polygons around a circle. In The Sand-Reckoner he devised a notation for expressing numbers vastly larger than any in ordinary use, in order to estimate the number of grains of sand that would fill the universe.
Outside pure mathematics, Archimedes founded the mathematical treatment of statics, formulating the law of the lever, and hydrostatics, discovering the principle — still called Archimedes' principle — that a body immersed in a fluid experiences an upward force equal to the weight of fluid it displaces. He also designed practical devices, including the Archimedes screw for raising water, and, according to later legend, engines of war used to defend Syracuse during the Roman siege of 213–212 BCE.
Archimedes was killed in 212 BCE when Syracuse fell to Roman forces under Marcellus, reportedly by a soldier while he was absorbed in a geometric diagram; Marcellus, who is said to have ordered Archimedes spared, had him buried with honor. His works survive mainly through Byzantine and Arabic manuscript traditions and were decisive for the revival of exact science in Renaissance Europe.
Workplaces: Syracuse, an independent Greek city-state in Sicily, Alexandria, Egypt (probable period of study)
Italy