Archimedes: History's Greatest Genius
“By gently pulling with his hand the end of a system of pulleys, he dragged it towards him with as smooth and even a motion as if it were passing over the sea” (Beck 134). This is from an excerpt in a writing by Plutarch, describing Archimedes and his system to lift a boat full of men and cargo. Archimedes was a philosopher, a scientist, and a mathematician. He was from Syracuse, Sicily, and his intelligence allowed for him to go beyond every other philosopher during his time, and even centuries later. He lived in the 200s B.C., and many times, King Hiero II would call upon Archimedes to solve his problems. With all of the great tales of philosophers out there, Archimedes’ story truly stands out from the …show more content…
One of those problems was of Hiero’s crown. King Hiero weighed out an amount of gold fit to make a crown, and then he ordered a goldsmith to smelt it into a wreath for him. Hiero was very suspicious of the dishonest-looking goldsmith, so he hired Archimedes to figure out the gold value in the wreath without dismantling, because a wreath is a very religious item. Archimedes was in the middle of taking a bath, and the solution “occurred when he stepped into his bath and caused it to overflow” (“The Golden Crown {Introduction}”). This sudden realization caused him to run around the streets of Syracuse half naked, yelling “Eureka,” meaning “I’ve found it” in Greek. By placing the amount of gold that Hiero measured out, he was able to find out if the wreath was full gold or not, and since the gold wreath displaced more water than the gold. Because of this water displacement, or the amount of water that spilled when the wreath or gold was lowered into it, he was able to find that the goldsmith had indeed put a cheaper metal into the wreath. Archimedes was able to find the amount of gold in the wreath without the modern technology available to mankind …show more content…
Pi (π) is known today as the mathematical symbol that represents the infinite decimal number that is found by the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. Back in the 200s B.C., Archimedes was on the verge of finding this number, and this was before many geometrical properties were found. Archimedes had a very meticulous and thorough process: he “drew two polygons around the circle’s center - one outside the circle ...[and]... on inside the circle” (Carroll). Then he compared the perimeters of the larger and smaller polygon, so the circle’s perimeter would be in between. Using 96 sided polygons, he was able to determine that pi had to be between approximately 3.142 and 3.140, only hundredths of decimals