Archimedes

Archimedes was born in 287BC on the island of Sicily. He was described as being absentminded, self-absorbed and somewhat eccentric, but even then he was thought of as a genius, and still is today.

He had many accomplishments, mainly in mathematics, which included how to calculate the area of a circle, and the surface area of a sphere. He was also remembered for an incident involving the king's crown.

He had been asked to find out how much gold there was in the crown, and couldn't think of a method, until having a bath one day, he realised that as he climbed into it, his body displaced the water that was already there. So if he filled a bath up to the top, placed the crown in it, collected and measured the water that poured out, he would know what the volume of the crown was.

Having thought this out, he is then supposed to have jumped out of the bath and run home shouting Eureka, Eureka, which is Greek for 'I have found it'.

He also went on to realise that if the mass of water that an object displaces, is greater than the object, the object will float, and if the mass of water is less than the object displacing it, the object will sink.

If the masses are the same, the object will stay suspended at whatever depth it was left at.

He also used the principle of levers and pulleys to help launch a new ship the king had built, The king has announced that everything that Archimedes said was henceforth to be believed.

When the Romans invaded, he invented huge grappling cranes that grabbed the roman ships and tipped them upside down when they tried to tie up in the harbour. When the ships stayed out of the cranes reach, Archimedes invented a huge catapult that hurled boulders at them. The Romans retreated from the harbour.

Unfortunately when the Romans did manage to capture the city, despite the generals request for Archimedes to be spared, he was killed by a Roman soldier.
We still use his principles today when we learn mathematics.

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