Archimedes law how to#

The dedication of The Sand Reckoner to Gelon, the son of King Hieron, is evidence that Archimedes was close to the family of King Hieron II. Some of the mathematicians there had claimed his results as their own, so Archimedes says that on the last occasion when he sent them theorems he included two which were false, “… so that those who claim to discover everything, but produce no proofs of the same, may be confuted as having pretended to discover the impossible.” He regarded Conon of Samos, one of the mathematicians at Alexandria, as a close friend and admired him for his abilities as a mathematician. In the preface to On Spirals, Archimedes relates that he often sent his friends in Alexandria statements of his latest theorems, but without giving proofs. The preface to The Sand Reckoner tells us that Archimedes’ father, Phidias, was an astronomer. Much of what is known about Archimedes comes from the prefaces to his works and from stories related by Plutarch, Livy and other ancient historiographers. He studied in Alexandria and then returned to Syracuse, where he spent the rest of his life.

Many of Archimedes’ works were lost when the Library of Alexandria was burnt (twice), and survived only in Latin or Arabic translations.Īrchimedes was born in the seaport colony of Syracuse, Magna Graecia (now Sicily), around 287 B.C.E. Plutarch recounts how Archimedes’ war machines defended Syracuse against Roman attackers during the Second Punic War. Ancient writers were more interested in his inventions and in the ingenious war machines which he developed than in his achievements in mathematics. Using only ancient Greek geometry, he also gave the equilibrium positions of floating sections of paraboloids as a function of their height, a feat that would be challenging for a modern physicist using calculus.Īrchimedes only became widely known as a mathematician after Eutocius brought out editions of some of his works, with commentaries, in the sixth century C.E. He was the first to identify the concept of center of gravity, and he found the centers of gravity of various geometric figures, including triangles, paraboloids, and hemispheres, assuming the uniform density of their interiors. Archimedes also invented the field of statics, enunciated the law of the lever, the law of equilibrium of fluids, and the law of buoyancy.

Archimedes law how to#

He discovered how to find the volume of a sphere and determined the value of Pi developed a way of counting using zeros to represent powers of ten discovered a formula to find the area under a curve and the amount of space enclosed by a curve and may have been the first to use integral calculus. Archimedes apparently studied mathematics in Alexandria, but lived most of his life in Syracuse. –212 B.C.E.) was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher, considered one of the greatest mathematicians in antiquity.