c. 287–212 BCE · mathematician · engineer
Archimedes of Syracuse
Ἀρχιμήδης
Worked in Syracuse but wrote to Alexandria: his prefaces address Conon and, after Conon's death, Dositheus there, and the Method is a letter to Eratosthenes. Diodorus says he had been in Egypt. Alexandria was where new mathematics was sent to be judged.
Their life and work
His letters are the evidence for Alexandria's place in mathematics. In the preface to the Method he tells Eratosthenes that he sends a way of finding results by mechanics before proving them by geometry, because Eratosthenes is able to judge it. The Method was known only by name until 1906, when Heiberg read it under a prayer book in a palimpsest at Constantinople. Diodorus's notice that he had been in Egypt goes with the water-lifting screw named after him, which Diodorus says the Egyptians used.
That he studied in Alexandria as a young man is a common modern inference from these letters. No ancient source says so. Conjectured
Our device: No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Archimedes of Syracuse, The Method of Mechanical Theorems, addressed to Eratosthenes · c. 240–220 BCE · Survives in large part
- Archimedes of Syracuse, On the Sphere and Cylinder, On Spirals, Quadrature of the Parabola, On Conoids and Spheroids · c. 240–212 BCE · Survives whole
Moments
- c. 245 BCE · Eratosthenes summoned; he measures the Earth Known: attested
In the show
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Sources (6)
- Archimedes, Method preface
- Archimedes, Quadrature of the Parabola preface
- Diodorus Siculus 5.37.3
- R. Netz (trans.), The Works of Archimedes, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2004)
- Diodorus Siculus 1.34.2
- T. L. Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921) (opens in a new tab)