| | Archimedes’ most famous (though not the greatest) [[accomplishment]] was when Hiero became suspicious that a crown made for him by his goldsmith was diluted with silver. Not knowing what to do, he turned to Archimedes for help. Archimedes realized that if there was silver in the crown it would displace more water than would be displaced by gold of an equal weight. As it turned out, the king's fears were justified; the goldsmith had cheated after all. | | Archimedes’ most famous (though not the greatest) [[accomplishment]] was when Hiero became suspicious that a crown made for him by his goldsmith was diluted with silver. Not knowing what to do, he turned to Archimedes for help. Archimedes realized that if there was silver in the crown it would displace more water than would be displaced by gold of an equal weight. As it turned out, the king's fears were justified; the goldsmith had cheated after all. |
| − | Archimedes also discovered the "Archimedes' principle", allegedly when he was sitting in a bathtub one day, recognizing that volume of a body can be measured by seeing how much the water rises when the body is submerged. He supposedly ran into town naked from his bathtub declaring “Eureka!”, meaning “I have found it!” | + | Archimedes also discovered the "Archimedes' principle," allegedly when he was sitting in a bathtub one day, recognizing that volume of a body can be measured by seeing how much the water rises when the body is submerged. He supposedly ran into town naked from his bathtub declaring “Eureka!”, meaning “I have found it!” |
| | Archimedes did a tremendous amount of ground-breaking work on [[lever]]s and [[pulley]]s, enabling the Greeks to move heavier things than ever before. He once bragged “give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth”. He also invented the Archimedes screw, a device (consisting of a large screw inside a pipe) still used in irrigation today. Despite all this, he considered his greatest accomplishment to be his two-volume work, ''On the [[Sphere]] and [[Cylinder]]''. In this work, he used the method of exhaustion to estimate the area of a circle and the volume of a sphere by successive approximations. This method is a precursor to the development of [[calculus]], 2000 years later. He had a diagram of a sphere and cylinder engraved from this work on his tombstone when he died. In 2005, a palimpsest was examined using X-ray technology to uncover some heretofore undiscovered works, including the ''Stomachion'', the most significant known use of combinatorics in the ancient world. | | Archimedes did a tremendous amount of ground-breaking work on [[lever]]s and [[pulley]]s, enabling the Greeks to move heavier things than ever before. He once bragged “give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth”. He also invented the Archimedes screw, a device (consisting of a large screw inside a pipe) still used in irrigation today. Despite all this, he considered his greatest accomplishment to be his two-volume work, ''On the [[Sphere]] and [[Cylinder]]''. In this work, he used the method of exhaustion to estimate the area of a circle and the volume of a sphere by successive approximations. This method is a precursor to the development of [[calculus]], 2000 years later. He had a diagram of a sphere and cylinder engraved from this work on his tombstone when he died. In 2005, a palimpsest was examined using X-ray technology to uncover some heretofore undiscovered works, including the ''Stomachion'', the most significant known use of combinatorics in the ancient world. |