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Archimedes
(c. 287 B.C. - c. 212 B.C.)
Greek mathematician and engineer who developed useful inventions and theories in mechanics and hydrostatics, including Archimedes principle, the Archimedean screw, and levers.
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Science Quotes by Archimedes (4 quotes)
Eureka! Eureka!
[I have found it!]
Supposed to have been his cry, jumping naked from his bath and running in the streets, excited by a discovery about water displacement to solve a problem about the purity of a gold crown.
[I have found it!]
Supposed to have been his cry, jumping naked from his bath and running in the streets, excited by a discovery about water displacement to solve a problem about the purity of a gold crown.
— Archimedes
Attributed. Archimedes probably never uttered the phrase in that way; he did not write about the eureka story. The earliest reference is by Vitruvius, a Roman writer, in the introduction of his ninth book of architecture, circa first century B.C. Being nearly 200 years after the presumed event, his story of Archimedes is likely exaggerated.
Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth.
— Archimedes
F. Hultsch (ed.) Pappus Alexandrinus: Collectio (1876-8), Vol. 3, book 8, section 10, ix.
Having been the discoverer of many splendid things, he is said to have asked his friends and relations that, after his death, they should place on his tomb a cylinder enclosing a sphere, writing on it the proportion of the containing solid to that which is contained.
— Archimedes
Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 17.12. Trans. R. W. Sharples.
If thou art able, O stranger, to find out all these things and gather them together in your mind, giving all the relations, thou shalt depart crowned with glory and knowing that thou hast been adjudged perfect in this species of wisdom.
— Archimedes
From a letter to Eratosthenes, the chief librarian at Alexandria, containing the Cattle Problem, an exceedingly difficult calculation involving huge numbers (which was not solved exactly until the use of a supercomputer in 1981). In David J. Darling, The Universal Book of Mathematics (2004), 23. The debate by scholars regarding whether Archimedes is the true author is in T. L. Heath (ed.), The Works of Archimedes (1897), xxxiv.
Quotes by others about Archimedes (7)
Hieron asked Archimedes to discover, without damaging it, whether a certain crown or wreath was made of pure gold, or if the goldsmith had fraudulently alloyed it with some baser metal. While Archimedes was turning the problem over in his mind, he chanced to be in the bath house. There, as he was sitting in the bath, he noticed that the amount of water that was flowing over the top of it was equal in volume to that part of his body that was immersed. He saw at once a way of solving the problem. He did not delay, but in his joy leaped out of the bath. Rushing naked through the streets towards his home, he cried out in a loud voice that he had found what he sought. For, as he ran, he repeatedly shouted in Greek; 'Eureka! Eurekal I've found it! I've found it!'
Vitrivius Pollio, De Architectura, ix, prologue, section 10.
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
In A Mathematician's Apology (1940, reprint with Foreward by C.P. Snow 1992), 81.
Referring to the decimal system of numeration or its equivalent (with some base other than 10): To what heights would science now be raised if Archimedes had made that discovery!
Gauss regarded this oversight as the greatest calamity in the history of science.
Gauss regarded this oversight as the greatest calamity in the history of science.
Quoted in James Roy Newman, The World of Mathematics, 328.
There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
Attributed
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
Quoted in Return to Mathematical Circles H. Eves (Boston 1988).
ARCHIMEDES. On hearing his name, shout 'Eureka!' Or else: 'Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world' There is also Archimedes' screw, but you are not expected to know what that is.
The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1881), trans. Jaques Barzun (1968), 15.
One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that 'the Bradman class' denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.
Variety of Men (1966), 87.
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan