Sunday, December 7, 2008

A FOR Archimedes was the eminent mathematician and excellent physicist of his time

Hey,
Archimedes was the eminent mathematician and excellent physicist of his time. He was born in Syracuse, on the island of Sicily in 287 B.C. At that time Sicily was a Greek land. Archimedes was the son of an astronomer. He studied at Alexandria in Egypt, and then returned to Syracuse. He early became an astronomer. He constructed a brass planisphere - a projection of the celestial sphere - that showed the revolution of the Sun, the Moon and the five known planets, and showed the nature of eclipses.
Discoveries and inventions
Archimedes became a popular figure as a result of his involvement in the defense of Syracuse against the Roman siege in the First and Second Punic Wars.
He proved that the ratio of a circle's perimeter to its diameter is the same as the ratio of the circle's area to the square of the radius
Archimedes is probably also the first mathematical physicist on record, and the best before Galileo and Newton. He invented the field of statics, enunciated the law of the lever, the law of equilibrium of fluids and the law of buoyancy.
Quotes about Archimedes
"Perhaps the best indication of what Archimedes truly loved most is his request that his tombstone include a cylinder circumscribing a sphere, accompanied by the inscription of his amazing theorem that the sphere is exactly two-thirds of the circumscribing cylinder in both surface area and volume!" (Laubenbacher and Pengelley, p. 95)
"...but regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest efforts only to those studies the subtlety and charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity." Plutarch, possibly explaining why Archimedes produced no writings that describe precisely the design of his inventions.

Named after Archimedes
Archimedes crater on the Moon.
Asteroid 3600 Archimedes, named in his honour
Archimedes computer
Archimedean tilings, Archimedean spirals, Archimedean solids, Trammal of Archimedes.
http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/archimedes.htm

1 comment:

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