Archimedes
Archimedes
Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer and inventor from Syracuse in Sicily. According to a well-known account, he was asked by King Hiero II to determine whether a crown was pure gold, and the solution came to him as he stepped into a bath, prompting him to cry out “Eureka!” The principle that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces still bears his name. He explained the law of the lever, approximated the value of pi, and calculated the surface area and volume of the sphere, a result he asked to have marked on his tomb. The Archimedes screw for raising water is attributed to him. He also designed machines to defend his city, and he died in 212 BC when Roman forces took Syracuse.
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From Archimedes to Newton
Archimedes explained the law of the lever and the principle of buoyancy in the third century BC. Nearly two thousand years later, Galileo built on his mechanics and turned the telescope to the heavens, while Kepler showed that the planets move in ellipses. Pascal showed through experiments that air pressure decreases with altitude. Newton drew these threads together in his Principia (1687), with three laws of motion and universal gravitation.
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