Archimedes biography wikipedia
He was a practical man who invented a wide variety of machines including pulleys and the Archimidean screw pumping device. View twelve larger pictures. Biography Archimedes ' father was Phidias, an astronomer. We know nothing else about Phidias other than this one fact and we only know this since Archimedes gives us this information in one of his works, The Sandreckoner.
A friend of Archimedes called Heracleides wrote a biography of him but sadly this work is lost. How our knowledge of Archimedes would be transformed if this lost work were ever found, or even extracts found in the writing of others. Archimedes was a native of Syracuse, Sicily. It is reported by some authors that he visited Egypt and there invented a device now known as Archimedes' screw.
This is a pump, still used in many parts of the world. It is highly likely that, when he was a young man, Archimedes studied with the successors of Euclid in Alexandria. Certainly he was completely familiar with the mathematics developed there, but what makes this conjecture much more certain, he knew personally the mathematicians working there and he sent his results to Alexandria with personal messages.
He regarded Conon of Samos , one of the mathematicians at Alexandria, both very highly for his abilities as a mathematician and he also regarded him as a close friend. In the preface to On spirals Archimedes relates an amusing story regarding his friends in Alexandria. He tells us that he was in the habit of sending them statements of his latest theorems, but without giving proofs.
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Apparently some of the mathematicians there had claimed the results as their own so Archimedes says that on the last occasion when he sent them theorems he included two which were false [ 3 ] Other than in the prefaces to his works, information about Archimedes comes to us from a number of sources such as in stories from Plutarch , Livy , and others.
There are, in fact, quite a number of references to Archimedes in the writings of the time for he had gained a reputation in his own time which few other mathematicians of this period achieved. The reason for this was not a widespread interest in new mathematical ideas but rather that Archimedes had invented many machines which were used as engines of war.
These were particularly effective in the defence of Syracuse when it was attacked by the Romans under the command of Marcellus. Plutarch writes in his work on Marcellus, the Roman commander, about how Archimedes' engines of war were used against the Romans in the siege of BC In the meantime huge poles thrust out from the walls over the ships and sunk some by great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane's beak and, when they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea; or else the ships, drawn by engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them.
A ship was frequently lifted up to a great height in the air a dreadful thing to behold , and was rolled to and fro, and kept swinging, until the mariners were all thrown out, when at length it was dashed against the rocks, or let fall. Archimedes had been persuaded by his friend and relation King Hieron to build such machines:- These machines [ Archimedes ] had designed and contrived, not as matters of any importance, but as mere amusements in geometry; in compliance with King Hiero's desire and request, some little time before, that he should reduce to practice some part of his admirable speculation in science, and by accommodating the theoretic truth to sensation and ordinary use, bring it more within the appreciation of the people in general.
Perhaps it is sad that engines of war were appreciated by the people of this time in a way that theoretical mathematics was not, but one would have to remark that the world is not a very different place at the end of the second millenium AD. Other inventions of Archimedes such as the compound pulley also brought him great fame among his contemporaries.
Again we quote Plutarch:- [ Archimedes ] had stated [ in a letter to King Hieron ] that given the force, any given weight might be moved, and even boasted, we are told, relying on the strength of demonstration, that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this. Hiero being struck with amazement at this, and entreating him to make good this problem by actual experiment, and show some great weight moved by a small engine, he fixed accordingly upon a ship of burden out of the king's arsenal, which could not be drawn out of the dock without great labour and many men; and, loading her with many passengers and a full freight, sitting himself the while far off, with no great endeavour, but only holding the head of the pulley in his hand and drawing the cords by degrees, he drew the ship in a straight line, as smoothly and evenly as if she had been in the sea.
Yet Archimedes, although he achieved fame by his mechanical inventions, believed that pure mathematics was the only worthy pursuit.
Again Plutarch describes beautifully Archimedes attitude, yet we shall see later that Archimedes did in fact use some very practical methods to discover results from pure geometry:- Archimedes possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasures of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained him the renown of more than human sagacity, he yet would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects; but, repudiating as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life; studies, the superiority of which to all others is unquestioned, and in which the only doubt can be whether the beauty and grandeur of the subjects examined, of the precision and cogency of the methods and means of proof, most deserve our admiration.
His fascination with geometry is beautifully described by Plutarch:- Oftimes Archimedes' servants got him against his will to the baths, to wash and anoint him, and yet being there, he would ever be drawing out of the geometrical figures, even in the very embers of the chimney. And while they were anointing of him with oils and sweet savours, with his fingers he drew lines upon his naked body, so far was he taken from himself, and brought into ecstasy or trance, with the delight he had in the study of geometry.
The achievements of Archimedes are quite outstanding. He is considered by most historians of mathematics as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He perfected a method of integration which allowed him to find areas, volumes and surface areas of many bodies. Any body wholly or partially immersed in fluid experiences an upthrust equal to, but opposite in direction to, the weight of the fluid displaced.
In the second part, he calculates the equilibrium positions of sections of paraboloids. This was probably an idealization of the shapes of ships' hulls. Some of his sections float with the base under water and the summit above water, similar to the way that icebergs float. Also known as Loculus of Archimedes or Archimedes' Box , [ 87 ] this is a dissection puzzle similar to a Tangram , and the treatise describing it was found in more complete form in the Archimedes Palimpsest.
Archimedes calculates the areas of the 14 pieces which can be assembled to form a square.
Reviel Netz of Stanford University argued in that Archimedes was attempting to determine how many ways the pieces could be assembled into the shape of a square. Netz calculates that the pieces can be made into a square 17, ways. It is addressed to Eratosthenes and the mathematicians in Alexandria. Archimedes challenges them to count the numbers of cattle in the Herd of the Sun by solving a number of simultaneous Diophantine equations.
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There is a more difficult version of the problem in which some of the answers are required to be square numbers. Amthor first solved this version of the problem [ 91 ] in , and the answer is a very large number , approximately 7. This treatise was thought lost until the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest in In this work Archimedes uses indivisibles , [ 6 ] [ 7 ] and shows how breaking up a figure into an infinite number of infinitely small parts can be used to determine its area or volume.
He may have considered this method lacking in formal rigor, so he also used the method of exhaustion to derive the results. Archimedes' Book of Lemmas or Liber Assumptorum is a treatise with 15 propositions on the nature of circles. The earliest known copy of the text is in Arabic. Heath and Marshall Clagett argued that it cannot have been written by Archimedes in its current form, since it quotes Archimedes, suggesting modification by another author.
The Lemmas may be based on an earlier work by Archimedes that is now lost.
Ley empuje archimedes biography pdf
It has also been claimed that the formula for calculating the area of a triangle from the length of its sides was known to Archimedes, [ d ] though its first appearance is in the work of Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD. The foremost document containing Archimedes' work is the Archimedes Palimpsest. In , the Danish professor Johan Ludvig Heiberg visited Constantinople to examine a page goatskin parchment of prayers, written in the 13th century, after reading a short transcription published seven years earlier by Papadopoulos-Kerameus.
Palimpsests were created by scraping the ink from existing works and reusing them, a common practice in the Middle Ages, as vellum was expensive. The older works in the palimpsest were identified by scholars as 10th-century copies of previously lost treatises by Archimedes. The palimpsest holds seven treatises, including the only surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in the original Greek.
Archimedes biography summary: Archimedes (born c. bce, Syracuse, Sicily [Italy]—died / bce, Syracuse) was the most famous mathematician and inventor in ancient Greece. He is especially important for his discovery of the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder.
It is the only known source of The Method of Mechanical Theorems , referred to by Suidas and thought to have been lost forever. Stomachion was also discovered in the palimpsest, with a more complete analysis of the puzzle than had been found in previous texts. The palimpsest was stored at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore , Maryland , where it was subjected to a range of modern tests including the use of ultraviolet and X-ray light to read the overwritten text.
Sometimes called the father of mathematics and mathematical physics , Archimedes had a wide influence on mathematics and science. Historians of science and mathematics almost universally agree that Archimedes was the finest mathematician from antiquity. Eric Temple Bell , for instance, wrote:. Any list of the three "greatest" mathematicians of all history would include the name of Archimedes.
Ley empuje archimedes biography wikipedia
The other two usually associated with him are Newton and Gauss. Some, considering the relative wealth—or poverty—of mathematics and physical science in the respective ages in which these giants lived, and estimating their achievements against the background of their times, would put Archimedes first. Simmons said of Archimedes:. If we consider what all other men accomplished in mathematics and physics, on every continent and in every civilization, from the beginning of time down to the seventeenth century in Western Europe, the achievements of Archimedes outweighs it all.
He was a great civilization all by himself. And so, since Archimedes led more than anyone else to the formation of the calculus and since he was the pioneer of the application of mathematics to the physical world, it turns out that Western science is but a series of footnotes to Archimedes. Thus, it turns out that Archimedes is the most important scientist who ever lived.
Leonardo da Vinci repeatedly expressed admiration for Archimedes, and attributed his invention Architonnerre to Archimedes. The inventor Nikola Tesla praised him, saying:. Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.
According to the Italian numismatist and archaeologist Filippo Paruta and Leonardo Agostini , a scholar from Siena, there was a bronze coin in Sicily with the portrait of Archimedes and a cylinder and sphere as well as his monogram ARMD in Roman script on the reverse. The Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics carries a portrait of Archimedes, along with a carving illustrating his proof on the sphere and the cylinder.
The inscription around the head of Archimedes is a quote attributed to 1st century AD poet Manilius , which reads in Latin: Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri "Rise above oneself and grasp the world". The exclamation of Eureka! In this instance, the word refers to the discovery of gold near Sutter's Mill in which sparked the California gold rush.
Vallianatos, Evaggelos 27 July Retrieved 17 April Father of mathematical physics: James H. Williams Jr. Boyer, Uta C. Merzbach, A History of Mathematics, p Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. The sharp thinking of Archimedes helped him become one of the chief figures of the ruler of his time.
He is said to have built a large ship on the order of ruler. The large ship was to be used for long travels, carry the supplies, and defend during the war. Apart from that, he was a brilliant mathematician. He discovered ways to measure the area of a circle. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled.
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