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1. The Adventurous Life of a Remarkable Scientist
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1 THE ADVENTUROUS LIFE OF A REMARKABLE SCIENTIST Archimedes was the greatest mathematician of classical antiquity and among the greatest scientists of all time. Endowed with remarkable intuition and audacity, Archimedes subjected his discoveries to rigorous and logical selfscrutiny [plates 1 and 10b]. A man of his time, he was so devoted to his own people and civic life that countless anecdotes about him have been preserved. Such tales, some two thousand years later, are still charming and entertaining. Let us consider one example. The second-century AD biographer Plutarch transmits this account: Therefore there is no reason to disbelieve the things which have been said concerning Archimedes. For example, charmed by a certain household Siren, he kept forgetting to eat and to care for his body. When the servants dragged him forcibly to the bathroom to wash and anoint him, he often drew a picture of some geometric figures in the ashes from the heater, and as soon I 2 THE GREAT ARCHIMEDES I as they had smeared him with oil, he traced some lines on his own limbs with his finger. [Life of Marcellus 17; cf. plate 3] Archimedes was born in 287 BC in Syracuse when the city was one of the largest and most powerful in the Mediterranean basin [fig. 1]. He was a relative and friend of Hiero II, his elder contemporary, who, by 271, had become the tyrant of Syracuse. Archimedes’ father, Phidias, was an astronomer: he taught his son how to determine the ratio between the diameter of the sun and the moon. Certainly Phidias taught him the first elements of mathematics, which Archimedes later perfected in Alexandria, the intellectual capital of the world. He moved to this city in approximately 243 BC. Less than thirty years before, Theocritus, the greatest poet of Syracuse and founder of the bucolic genre, had relocated to the same cultural center. Though Archimedes would ultimately not settle in Egypt, his time in Alexandria was vital for his formation, for there he joined a circle of scientists, all of whom belonged to the generation that followed immediately on that of the famous mathematician Euclid. Chief among those he befriended was the geographer Eratosthenes of Cyrene, to whom he would later dedicate his Method. Others of his colleagues were the astronomer Conon of Samos, whom he always held in high regard, and Dositeus, to whom he dedicated the treatise On the Sphere and the Cylinder, as well as On Spirals and On Conoids and Spheroids. With these colleagues Archimedes exchanged letters from Sicily, testing their work before offering them a definitive response. As a result, they were willing to discuss their ideas with him and suggest possible changes and improvements. Archimedes showed ingenuity in his many important discoveries, some of which, since they can be dated earlier than him, are attributed to him only by legend. Nevertheless , many of these attributions are not without firm [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:58 GMT) THE ADVENTUROUS LIFE OF A REMARKABLE SCIENTIST 3 I Figure 1 Statue of “The Great Archimedes” by Zurab Tsereteli. 4 THE GREAT ARCHIMEDES I historical grounding, such as the construction of some modern weaponry (cf. chap. 7), the discovery of the principle of the lever (chap. 3), and the law relating to bodies immersed in a liquid (chap. 4). Archimedes wrote in Doric, the Greek dialect of Syracuse ; at Alexandria, by contrast, the literary dialect would have been Attic. Archimedes’ language and his literary dialect were thus passed down through the centuries. Though formulated in the impersonal language of mathematics, Archimedes’ style has a surprisingly personal tone, described by Plutarch: For it is impossible, in geometry, to find harder and deeper hypotheses being treated in simpler and clearer terms. With regard to Archimedes, some attribute this to his inherited talent, while others think that he did it by working tirelessly, imagining that he achieved each of his individual accomplishments easily and adroitly. No one could, by effort alone, have discovered such mathematical proofs, and yet, as soon as anyone had learned from Archimedes, he had the impression that he himself could be successful in similar research. Thus, the road on which Archimedes led his followers toward demonstrated proof was smooth and easy. [Life of Marcellus 17] It should be noted, of course, that the original texts of Archimedes describe the mathematical problems in a way significantly different from those of today because he did not have access to our modern algebraic symbolism...