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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.

Science Quotes by Archimedes (2)

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.
See also:  |  Lever (2)  |  Mechanics (11)  |  Saying (24)

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.
See also:  |  Geometry (15)  |  Mathematics (128)



Quotes by others about Archimedes (6)

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.
See also:  |  Archimedes (6)  |  Research (140)

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.
See also:  |  Archimedes (6)  |  Mathematics (128)

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.
Quoted in James Roy Newman, The World of Mathematics, 328.
See also:  |  Archimedes (6)  |  Decimal (3)  |  Number (15)

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
Attributed
See also:  |  Archimedes (6)  |  Mathematician (25)

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).
See also:  |  Archimedes (6)  |  Arithmetic (8)

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.
See also:  |  Archimedes (6)  |  Quip (37)


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