Archimedes: Contribution To Science And Mathematics

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Archimedean to this day is a famous mathematician and astronomer. He lived during ancient Greek times up until 211/212 BCE when Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier. Left behind were countless books or treatise that talk about all his works and accomplishments. His father was said to be an astronomer which could have been why Archimedean got into science and mathematics. Most of the information that was written on Archimedes was lost over the centuries, however, what it did show was how talented of a mathematician he truly was. (Hellenistic mathematics, 2010) Not only was he a mathematician but during the Second Punic War he did help defeat the Romans by creating inventions that would help catapult stones, sink their fleets and burn their…show more content…
It is said that he was in the bathtub and noticed that when he got into the tub the water rose. The story goes that Archimedes then ran into the streets yelling Eureka which in Greek means he figured it out. According to some websites, he was asked by the king of the time to make sure that the crown he was given was made of pure gold, however, the crown could not be destroyed in the process. Archimedes learned that if you put the object into a liquid, it will float only when the weight of the object is equal to the weight of the fluid. This became know as the Archimedes Principle. (Hellenistic mathematics,…show more content…
There were three major statements involved in this theory. Archimedes was able to use square roots, geometric means and more to figure out the measurement of a circle. He was able to compute the area of a circle by using the area of a right-angled triangle. By completing these computations, he gave us a way to find the radius and the circumference of the circle. Another preposition we learned was that we could get the diameter of a circle if we use a square. Finally, he taught us the ratio of the circumference of any circle to the diameter. Archimedes used shapes in which he already knew the measurements to solve other shapes. Although Archimedes never used the mathematical symbol of pi, if you used the Archimedean computation of a circle, then that result will give you an approximated value for the mathematical symbol of pi. (Boyer, Merzbach 2011) Another work of Archimedes was on the sphere and cylinder, this accomplishment was published into two separate volumes. Within the two volumes, Archimedes proved the “relationship between a sphere and a circumscribing cylinder of the same height and diameter” (Hellenistic mathematics, 2010). The biggest accomplishment of the volumes was that he computed what the volume of a cylinder is, what the surface area of a sphere is, and what the volume of the contained ball was. Archimedes was so proud of his
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