Archimedes Essay!!!

 B5 Algebra

I chose to write about Archimedes because of two reasons. The first one is because his name was used in the sword and the stone… remember the smart sarcastic little owl?? The second reason is because Archimedes is considered one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time.  For this essay I’m going to focus on Archimedes’s life and all the great/ funny things he did.  Archimedes was known as “The wise one,” and “The master” and “The great geometer” his work and inventions are still talked about today. He was a fabulous mathematician.

            Archimedes was born in 287 B.C., at Syracuse, a Greek seaport colony in Sicily; his dad was Phidias, an astronomer. It makes sense that his dad was an astronomer, the smarts are passed along, huh?!?! Archimedes spent most of his life at his birthplace, not counting when he attended Euclid's school in Alexandria. Obviously, he proved to be a master at mathematics and he spent most of his time thinking  about new problems to solve, sometimes he was so involved in his work that he forgot to eat. Archimedes didn’t have paper or blackboards  so he used any available surface, from the dust/durt on the ground to ashes from an extinguished fire, in order to draw his geometric figures. He never stopped thinking about math!!! Sometimes, after having a bath and anointing himself with olive oil, he would trace figures in the oil on his skin. Talk about devotion!!! Once, he was pondering a solution to a problem the king gave him while he was in the bathtub and he figured it out! He was so excited that he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka! eureka!" (I have found it!).  Archimedes has done tons of amazing things.  In order to tell you a few I have a huge quote from a website called http://www.mathcs.org/analysis/reals/history/archimed.html

I couldn’t have said it as good as they did…

“Though he had many great inventions, Archimedes considered his purely theoretical work to be his true calling. His accomplishments are numerous. His approximation of between 3-1/2 and 3-10/71 was the most accurate of his time and he devised a new way to approximate square roots. Unhappy with the unwieldy Greek number system, he devised his own that could accommodate larger numbers more easily. He invented the entire field of hydrostatics with the discovery of the Archimedes' Principle. However, his greatest invention was integral calculus. To determine the area of sections bounded by geometric figures such as parabolas and ellipses, Archimedes broke the sections into an infinite number of rectangles and added the areas together. This is known as integration. He also anticipated the invention of differential calculus as he devised ways to approximate the slope of the tangent lines to his figures. In addition, he also made many other discoveries in geometry, mechanics and other fields.”

It’s amazing what he did with his life !!! to close I’ll share the last few years of his life. The end of hi life was quite busy. King Heiro was impressed with   Archimedes’s work so he persuaded him to develop weapons to protect the city. These inventions were VERY useful! Some of his inventions were: Huge catapults that hurled 500 pound boulders at the enemy soldiers; large cranes with claws on the end lowered down on the enemy ships, lifted them in the air, and then threw them against the rocks; and a system of mirrors focused the suns rays to light enemy ships on fire. All of which they used to get the Romans out of Greece, they foughteach other for eight months before Greece fell. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier when the city was taken. The traditional story is that the mathematician didn’t  know what was going on in the city. While he was drawing figures in the dust, a Roman soldier stepped on them and demanded him to come with him. Archimedes responded, "Don't disturb my circles!" The soldier was so angry that he pulled out his sword and slew Archimedes. When Archimedes was buried, they put a sphere inscribed inside a cylinder and the 2:3 ratio of the volumes between them, on his tombstone, the figure of the solution to the problem he considered his greatest achievement. He was an amazing guy! We wouldn’t have the knowledge we have today without him.