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Authors: Mario Livio
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Heracleides, has not survived, and the few details that we do know about his life and violent death come primarily from the writings of the Roman historian Plutarch. Plutarch (ca. AD 46–120) was, in fact, more interested in the military accomplishments of the Roman general Marcellus, who conquered Archimedes’ home town of Syracuse in 212 BC. Fortunately for the history of mathematics, Archimedes had given Marcellus such a tremendous headache during the siege of Syracuse that the three major historians of the period, Plutarch, Polybius, and Livy, couldn’t ignore him.
Figure 10
Archimedes was born in Syracuse, then a Greek settlement in Sicily. According to his own testimony, he was the son of the astronomer Phidias, about whom little is known beyond the fact that he had estimated the ratio of the diameters of the Sun and the Moon. Archimedes may have also been related in some way to King Hieron II, himself the illegitimate son of a nobleman (by one of the latter’s female slaves). Irrespective of whichever ties Archimedes might have had with the royal family, both the king and his son, Gelon, always held Archimedes in high regard. As a youth, Archimedes spent some time in Alexandria, where he studied mathematics, before returning to a life of extensive research in Syracuse.
Archimedes was truly a mathematician’s mathematician. According to Plutarch, he regarded as sordid and ignoble “every art directed to use and profit, and he only strove after those things which, in their beauty and excellence, remain beyond all contact with the common needs of life.” Archimedes’ preoccupation with abstract mathematics and the level to which he was consumed by it apparently went much farther even than the enthusiasm commonly exhibited by practitioners of this discipline. Again according to Plutarch:
Continually bewitched by a Siren who always accompanied him, he forgot to nourish himself and omitted to care for his body; and when, as would often happen, he was urged by force to bathe and anoint himself, he would still be drawing geometrical figures in the ashes or with his fingers would draw lines on his anointed body, being possessed by a great ecstasy and in truth a thrall to the Muses.
In spite of his contempt for applied mathematics, and the little importance that Archimedes himself attached to his engineering ideas, his resourceful inventions gained him even more popular fame than his mathematical genius.
The best-known legend about Archimedes further enhances his image as the stereotypical absentminded mathematician. This amusing story was first told by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the first century BC, and it goes like this: King Hieron wanted to consecrate agold wreath to the immortal gods. When the wreath was delivered to the king, it was equal in weight to the gold furnished for its creation. The king was nonetheless suspicious that a certain amount of gold had been replaced by silver of the same weight. Not being able to substantiate his distrust, the king turned for advice to the master of mathematicians—Archimedes. One day, the legend continued, Archimedes stepped into a bath, while still engrossed in the problem of how to uncover potential fraud with the wreath. As he immersed himself in the water, however, he realized that his body displaced a certain volume of water, which overflowed the tub’s edge. This immediately triggered a solution in his head. Overwhelmed with joy, Archimedes jumped out of the tub and ran naked in the street shouting “ Eureka, eureka! ” (“I have found it, I have found it!”).
Another famous Archimedean exclamation, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth,” is currently featured (in one version or another) on more than 150,000 Web pages found in a Google search. This bold proclamation, sounding almost like the vision statement of a large corporation, has been cited by Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and John F. Kennedy and it was even featured in a poem
Figure 10
Archimedes was born in Syracuse, then a Greek settlement in Sicily. According to his own testimony, he was the son of the astronomer Phidias, about whom little is known beyond the fact that he had estimated the ratio of the diameters of the Sun and the Moon. Archimedes may have also been related in some way to King Hieron II, himself the illegitimate son of a nobleman (by one of the latter’s female slaves). Irrespective of whichever ties Archimedes might have had with the royal family, both the king and his son, Gelon, always held Archimedes in high regard. As a youth, Archimedes spent some time in Alexandria, where he studied mathematics, before returning to a life of extensive research in Syracuse.
Archimedes was truly a mathematician’s mathematician. According to Plutarch, he regarded as sordid and ignoble “every art directed to use and profit, and he only strove after those things which, in their beauty and excellence, remain beyond all contact with the common needs of life.” Archimedes’ preoccupation with abstract mathematics and the level to which he was consumed by it apparently went much farther even than the enthusiasm commonly exhibited by practitioners of this discipline. Again according to Plutarch:
Continually bewitched by a Siren who always accompanied him, he forgot to nourish himself and omitted to care for his body; and when, as would often happen, he was urged by force to bathe and anoint himself, he would still be drawing geometrical figures in the ashes or with his fingers would draw lines on his anointed body, being possessed by a great ecstasy and in truth a thrall to the Muses.
In spite of his contempt for applied mathematics, and the little importance that Archimedes himself attached to his engineering ideas, his resourceful inventions gained him even more popular fame than his mathematical genius.
The best-known legend about Archimedes further enhances his image as the stereotypical absentminded mathematician. This amusing story was first told by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the first century BC, and it goes like this: King Hieron wanted to consecrate agold wreath to the immortal gods. When the wreath was delivered to the king, it was equal in weight to the gold furnished for its creation. The king was nonetheless suspicious that a certain amount of gold had been replaced by silver of the same weight. Not being able to substantiate his distrust, the king turned for advice to the master of mathematicians—Archimedes. One day, the legend continued, Archimedes stepped into a bath, while still engrossed in the problem of how to uncover potential fraud with the wreath. As he immersed himself in the water, however, he realized that his body displaced a certain volume of water, which overflowed the tub’s edge. This immediately triggered a solution in his head. Overwhelmed with joy, Archimedes jumped out of the tub and ran naked in the street shouting “ Eureka, eureka! ” (“I have found it, I have found it!”).
Another famous Archimedean exclamation, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth,” is currently featured (in one version or another) on more than 150,000 Web pages found in a Google search. This bold proclamation, sounding almost like the vision statement of a large corporation, has been cited by Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and John F. Kennedy and it was even featured in a poem
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