![]() Hieron marveled at his mastery and frequently put him to the test. Today it is standard issue in sewage treatment, irrigation, and other applications where it is vital to move large amounts of water with minimal effort.ĭuring Archimedes' lifetime, his most famous inventions, and presumably the bulk of his income, came from his friendship with King Hieron II of Syracuse. Developed initially to irrigate croplands along the Nile delta, his water screw was also used to drain water from underground mines, to water the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and to pump bilge from the pharaoh's ships. Yet he is said to have invented his most lasting practical device – the Archimedes screw – while immersed in these lofty concepts in Egypt. It was Archimedes' passion for geometric abstractions that led to his disdain for engineering. He spent formative years in Alexandria, Egypt – academic ground-zero during the Hellenic period – where he reportedly worked and studied with the successors of the great mathematician Euclid. Presently, the picture is located in the art museum Alte Meister in Dresden, Germany. “Archimedes Thoughtful” was painted about 1620 by Domenico Fetti in Mantua. His father was the astronomer Phidias, which could account for his natural bent toward the sciences and one of his primary later inventions, an early planetarium. His own writings disclose that he was born in Syracuse – then a self-governing city-state and the most important seaport on the Greek-controlled island of Sicily. Accounts of his life were written decades after his death, and leave plenty of room for uncertainty about his actual accomplishments and the true nature of his character. Unlike his mathematical work, he left few formal treatises behind describing his inventions. With little in the written record to go on, most attempts to chronicle his life invariably comprise some mix of fable, fact, and fudge factor. One wonders how the man whose brilliant feats of engineering include the compound pulley and the theory of hydrostatics would fare in today's job market.Īnd so it is with Archimedes. He is most widely known for running naked through the streets of Syracuse. Compared to the conceptual rigors of his favorite academic pastime of geometry, engineering and other pursuits that addressed worldly necessities of living were to him "sordid and ignoble." His obsessive interest in mathematical abstractions came at the expense of personal hygiene and earned him a reputation as ancient Greece's first absent-minded professor. His famous inventions brought water to arid lands and held invading Roman armies at bay, but he vocally disdained them. With all that going for him, Archimedes was no doubt the ancient world's poster boy for science and technology careers, right? Wrong. He even gave scientists and engineers their ultimate catch-phrase, "Eureka!" ![]() includes some three dozen new tools and weapons systems as well as a pioneering role in plane and solid geometry. ![]() 212 BCE) was a scholastic "triple-threat" who made astonishingly original contributions to mathematics, physics, and engineering. One of the greatest minds of classical antiquity, Archimedes (c.
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