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Greek
mathematician, physicist and inventor, born and died in Syracuse. He
discovered the principles of specific gravity and of the lever. His
works included "Method of Mechanical Theorems" and "On Floating
Bodies." He named the number, later known as pi, as the Archimedes
Constant.
He
directed the defence of Syracuse when it was attacked by the Romans.
For three years the city held off the army of Marcellus. Archimedes
designed machines to throw stones long distances and is supposed to
have set ships on fire using well-placed mirrors.
The
death of Archimedes - A mosaic originally believed to date from ancient
times, but now thought to be the work of a Renaissance artist . Located
in the St�delsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, Germany.
Nevertheless
the Romans managed to enter the city by surprise and he was killed by a
soldier, although Marcellus had ordered that he be spared.
According
to Plutarch's Parallel Lives: Marcellus: "His discoveries were numerous
and admirable; but he is said to have requested his friends and
relations that, when he was dead, they would place over his tomb a
sphere containing a cylinder, inscribing it with the ratio which the
containing solid bears to the contained."
Dryden's
translation is incorrect as the Greek text states that it is the
cylinder that contains the sphere. In his work On the Sphere and
Cylinder Archimedes proved that the ratio of the volume of a sphere to
the volume of the cylinder that contains it is 2:3. In that same work
he also proved that the ratio of the surface area of a sphere to the
surface area of the cylinder that contains it, together with its
circular ends, is also 2:3. Because expressions for the volume and
surface area of a cylinder were known before his time, Archimedes'
results established the first exact expressions for the volume and
surface area of a sphere. |
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