Archimedes

I was born at Syracuse on Sicily and learned much in Alexandria, under the friendship of Conon and by letters with Eratosthenes. I returned to Hieron’s city, where devices served my demonstrations. I valued proof above applause; above all I delighted in the relation of sphere to cylinder—two-thirds in both surface and volume. I asked that these figures mark my grave.

In geometry I pressed the method of exhaustion hard. By inscribing and circumscribing polygons up to ninety-six sides, I bounded the circle’s ratio between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. I traced the spiral that bears my name and squared the parabolic segment, proving its area to be four-thirds of the associated triangle. In The Sand Reckoner I fashioned names for immense numbers and, for reckoning, even took Aristarchus’s sun-centered cosmos as a model.

In mechanics I set down the law of the lever and sought centers of gravity; give me a place to stand, and the earth would move. In hydrostatics I wrote On Floating Bodies and showed why a body displaces its own weight of fluid—let others embroider it with crowns and baths. I built water screws and compound pulleys, and in the Roman siege my grapnels—our “claw”—raised prows from the sea. I was killed in the sack despite Marcellus’s command to spare me.