Archimedes

Greek scientist and a mathematician

(287 BC–212 BC)
 Archimedes

(287 BC–212 BC)[1] was a Greek scientist. He was an inventor,

an astronomer, and a mathematician. He was born in the town
of Syracusein Sicily.
His father was Phidias, an astronomer, and he may have been in the family
of a king of Syracuse. Syracuse was a rich Greek city, on the sea shore in
Sicily. When Archimedes was about ten years old, he left Syracuse to study
in Alexandria, Egypt. He was in the school of Euclid, a
famous mathematician. Not much is known about the personal life of
Archimedes, for example, whether he was married or if he had children.
When the Romans invaded Syracuse, they captured Archimedes so they
could learn all of the things he knew. About two years after he was drawing
a mathematical diagram in the sand and enraged a soldier by refusing to
go to meet the Roman general until he had finished working on the
problem. The Roman killed him. His last words are supposed to have been
“Do not disturb my circles!”
Archimedes was 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 in developing countries, 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.

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.
His Works

There are nine extant treatises by Archimedes in Greek. The principal

results in On the Sphere and Cylinder (in two books) are that the surface
area of any sphere of radius r is four times that of its greatest circle (in
modern notation, S = 4πr2) and that the volume of a sphere is two-thirds
that of the cylinder in which it is inscribed (leading immediately to the
formula for the volume, V = 4/3πr3). Archimedes was proud enough of the
latter discovery to leave instructions for his tomb to be marked with a
sphere inscribed in a cylinder. Marcus Tullius Cicero(106–43 BCE) found
the tomb, overgrown with vegetation, a century and a half after
Archimedes’ death.

Sphere with circumscribing cylinderThe volume of a sphere is 4πr3/3, and

the volume of the circumscribing cylinder is 2πr3. The surface area of a
sphere is 4πr2, and the surface area of the circumscribing cylinder is 6πr2.
Hence, any sphere has both two-thirds the volume and two-thirds the
surface area of its circumscribing cylinder.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Measurement of the Circle is a fragment of a longer work in which π (pi),
the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is shown to lie
between the limits of 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. Archimedes’ approach to determining
π, which consists of inscribing and circumscribing regular polygons with a
large number of sides, was followed by everyone until the development
of infinite series expansions in India during the 15th century and in Europe
during the 17th century. That work also contains accurate approximations
(expressed as ratios of integers) to the square roots of 3 and several large
numbers.
On Conoids and Spheroids deals with determining the volumes of the
segments of solids formed by the revolution of a conic section (circle,
ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola) about its axis. In modern terms, those are
problems of integration. (See calculus.) On Spirals develops many
properties of tangents to, and areas associated with, the spiral of
Archimedes—i.e., the locus of a point moving with uniform speed along a
straight line that itself is rotating with uniform speed about a fixed point. It
was one of only a few curves beyond the straight line and the conic
sections known in antiquity.
On the Equilibrium of Planes (or Centres of Gravity of Planes; in two books)
is mainly concerned with establishing the centres of gravity of various
rectilinear plane figures and segments of the parabola and the paraboloid.
The first book purports to establish the “law of the lever” (magnitudes
balance at distances from the fulcrum in inverse ratio to their weights), and
it is mainly on the basis of that treatise that Archimedes has been called the
founder of theoretical mechanics. Much of that book, however, is
undoubtedly not authentic, consisting as it does of inept later additions or
reworkings, and it seems likely that the basic principle of the law of the
lever and—possibly—the concept of the centre of gravity were established
on a mathematical basis by scholars earlier than Archimedes. His
contribution was rather to extend those concepts to conic sections.
Quadrature of the Parabola demonstrates, first by “mechanical” means (as
in Method, discussed below) and then by conventional geometric methods,
that the area of any segment of a parabola is 4/3 of the area of the triangle
having the same base and height as that segment. That is, again, a
problem in integration.
The Sand-Reckoner is a small treatise that is a jeu d’esprit written for the
layman—it is addressed to Gelon, son of Hieron—that nevertheless
contains some profoundly original mathematics. Its object is to remedy the
inadequacies of the Greek numerical notation system by showing how to
express a huge number—the number of grains of sand that it would take to
fill the whole of the universe. What Archimedes does, in effect, is to create
a place-value system of notation, with a base of 100,000,000. (That was
apparently a completely original idea, since he had no knowledge of the
contemporary Babylonian place-value system with base 60.) The work is
also of interest because it gives the most detailed surviving description of
the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 BCE) and
because it contains an account of an ingenious procedure that Archimedes
used to determine the Sun’s apparent diameter by observation with an
instrument.
Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems describes a process of
discovery in mathematics. It is the sole surviving work from antiquity, and
one of the few from any period, that deals with this topic. In it Archimedes
recounts how he used a “mechanical” method to arrive at some of his key
discoveries, including the area of a parabolic segment and the surface area
and volume of a sphere. The technique consists of dividing each of two
figures into an infinite but equal number of infinitesimally thin strips, then
“weighing” each corresponding pair of these strips against each other on a
notional balance to obtain the ratio of the two original figures. Archimedes
emphasizes that, though useful as a heuristic method, this procedure does
not constitute a rigorous proof.
On Floating Bodies (in two books) survives only partly in Greek, the rest
in medieval Latin translation from the Greek. It is the first known work
on hydrostatics, of which Archimedes is recognized as the founder. Its
purpose is to determine the positions that various solids will assume when
floating in a fluid, according to their form and the variation in their specific
gravities. In the first book various general principles are established,
notably what has come to be known as Archimedes’ principle: a solid
denser than a fluid will, when immersed in that fluid, be lighter by the
weight of the fluid it displaces. The second book is a mathematical tour de
force unmatched in antiquity and rarely equaled since. In it Archimedes
determines the different positions of stability that a right paraboloid of
revolution assumes when floating in a fluid of greater specific gravity,
according to geometric and hydrostatic variations.
Archimedes is known, from references of later authors, to have written a
number of other works that have not survived. Of particular interest are
treatises on catoptrics, in which he discussed, among other things, the
phenomenon of refraction; on the 13 semiregular (Archimedean) polyhedra
(those bodies bounded by regular polygons, not necessarily all of the same
type, that can be inscribed in a sphere); and the “Cattle Problem”
(preserved in a Greek epigram), which poses a problem in indeterminate
analysis, with eight unknowns. In addition to those, there survive several
works in Arabic translation ascribed to Archimedes that cannot have been
composed by him in their present form, although they may contain
“Archimedean” elements. Those include a work on inscribing the regular
heptagon in a circle; a collection of lemmas (propositions assumed to be
true that are used to prove a theorem) and a book, On Touching Circles,
both having to do with elementary plane geometry; and
the Stomachion(parts of which also survive in Greek), dealing with a square
divided into 14 pieces for a game or puzzle.
Archimedes’ mathematical proofs and presentation exhibit great boldness
and originality of thought on the one hand and extreme rigour on the other,
meeting the highest standards of contemporary geometry. While
the Method shows that he arrived at the formulas for the surface area and
volume of a sphere by “mechanical” reasoning involving infinitesimals, in
his actual proofs of the results in Sphere and Cylinder he uses only the
rigorous methods of successive finite approximation that had been invented
by Eudoxus of Cnidus in the 4th century BCE. These methods, of which
Archimedes was a master, are the standard procedure in all his works on
higher geometry that deal with proving results about areas and volumes.
Their mathematical rigour stands in strong contrast to the “proofs” of the
first practitioners of integral calculus in the 17th century, when infinitesimals
were reintroduced into mathematics. Yet Archimedes’ results are no less
impressive than theirs. The same freedom from conventional ways of
thinking is apparent in the arithmetical field in Sand-Reckoner, which shows
a deep understanding of the nature of the numerical system.

In antiquity Archimedes was also known as an outstanding astronomer: his

observations of solstices were used by Hipparchus (flourished c. 140 BCE),
the foremost ancient astronomer. Very little is known of this side of
Archimedes’ activity, although Sand-Reckoner reveals his keen
astronomical interest and practical observational ability. There has,
however, been handed down a set of numbers attributed to him giving the
distances of the various heavenly bodies from Earth, which has been
shown to be based not on observed astronomical data but on a
“Pythagorean” theory associating the spatial intervals between the planets
with musical intervals. Surprising though it is to find
those metaphysicalspeculations in the work of a practicing astronomer,
there is good reason to believe that their attribution to Archimedes is
correct.

His Influence

Given the magnitude and originality of Archimedes’ achievement, the

influence of his mathematics in antiquity was rather small. Those of his
results that could be simply expressed—such as the formulas for the
surface area and volume of a sphere—became mathematical
commonplaces, and one of the bounds he established for π, 22/7, was
adopted as the usual approximation to it in antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, his mathematical work was not continued or developed, as
far as is known, in any important way in ancient times, despite his hope
expressed in Method that its publication would enable others to make new
discoveries. However, when some of his treatises were translated into
Arabic in the late 8th or 9th century, several mathematicians of medieval
Islam were inspired to equal or improve on his achievements. That holds
particularly in the determination of the volumes of solids of revolution, but
his influence is also evident in the determination of centres of gravity and in
geometric construction problems. Thus, several meritorious works by
medieval Islamic mathematicians were inspired by their study of
Archimedes.
The greatest impact of Archimedes’ work on later mathematicians came in
the 16th and 17th centuries with the printing of texts derived from the
Greek, and eventually of the Greek text itself, the Editio Princeps,
in Basel in 1544. The Latin translation of many of Archimedes’ works by
Federico Commandino in 1558 contributed greatly to the spread of
knowledge of them, which was reflected in the work of the foremost
mathematicians and physicists of the time, including Johannes
Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). David Rivault’s
edition and Latin translation (1615) of the complete works, including the
ancient commentaries, was enormously influential in the work of some of
the best mathematicians of the 17th century, notably René
Descartes (1596–1650) and Pierre de Fermat (1601–65). Without the
background of the rediscovered ancient mathematicians, among whom
Archimedes was paramount, the development of mathematics in Europe in
the century between 1550 and 1650 is inconceivable. It is unfortunate
that Method remained unknown to both Arabic
and Renaissance mathematicians (it was only rediscovered in the late 19th
century), for they might have fulfilled Archimedes’ hope that the work would
prove useful in the discovery of theorems.

Archimedes, the inventor and engineer

Archimedes is also famous as an inventor because he made
new tools and machines. For example, he made a machine to lift water that
could be used by farmers to bring water to their crops. This is
called Archimedes' screw.
Archimedes probably also invented a machine to measure distance,
an odometer. A cart was built with wheels that turned four hundred times in
one mile. A pinon the wheel would hit a 400-tooth gear, so it turned once
for every mile. This gear would then make a small stone fall into a cup. At
the end of a journey one could count the number of stones in the cup to
find the distance.
Archimedes also made a system which one person could pull a
large ship with just one rope. This was called the compound pulley. This is
an important machine which is even today helps people in everyday life,
although the versions we now use are much more complicated. They still
work by the same principle, through.

Archimedes at war
Archimedes also invented or made many machines used in war, for
example he made better catapults. This was during the Punic Wars, which
were between Rome in what is now Italy and the city of Carthage in what is
now North Africa. For many years he helped stop the Roman army from
attacking Syracuse, his city. One war machine was called the "claw of
Archimedes", or the "iron hand". It was used to defend the city from attacks
by ships. Ancient writers said that it was a kind of crane with a hook that
lifted ships out of the water and caused their destruction.
Another story about Archimedes is that he burned Roman ships from far
away using many mirrors and the light from the sun. This is perhaps
possible, but it is perhaps more likely that this was done
with flaming missiles from a catapult.

Tributes to Archimedes
Archimedes is thought to be so important as
a mathematician that scientists have honoured him:

 A large hole or crater on the moon is named after Archimedes.

 Some mountains on the moon are called the Montes Archimedes

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 Name : Kumar Atharva
Class : VI
Section : F
Roll No. : 20