c. 287–212 BCE
Mathematician and engineer of antiquity's greatest ingenuity.
Archimedes was born about 287 BCE in Syracuse, a Greek city of Sicily, and is remembered as the greatest mathematician and engineer of the ancient world. He worked at the edges of what his age could imagine, and often past them.
By the method of exhaustion he approached what later ages would call the calculus, and rigorously proved theorems on the areas and volumes of curved figures; he fixed the value of pi between three and one-seventh and three and ten-seventy-firsts, a precision unmatched for centuries.
He gave the world the principle of buoyancy that still bears his name, and the law of the lever, of which he is said to have declared: give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth. His inventions — the water-raising screw, the compound pulley, the engines that defended Syracuse against the Roman siege — married theory to iron.
He was killed about 212 BCE by a Roman soldier when Syracuse at last fell, reportedly while bent over a diagram, though the general had ordered him spared. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.
Kept with honor.
References
Biography drawn from the public historical record, verifiable against the sources above.
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