Archimedes / by Sir Thomas Heath.

  • Thomas Little Heath
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Archimedes / by Sir Thomas Heath. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ARCHIMEDES. If the ordinary person were asked to say off-hand what he knew of Archimedes, he would probably, at the most, be able to quote one or other of the well-known stories about him : how, after discovering the solution of some problem in the bath, he was so overjoyed that he ran naked to his house, shouting evprj/ca, evpijtca (or, as we might say, “ I’ve got it, I’ve got it ”); or how he said “ Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth ; or again how he was killed, at the capture of Syracuse in the Second Punic War, by a Roman soldier who resented being told to get away from a diagram drawn on the ground which he was studying. And it is to be feared that few who are not experts in the history of mathematics have any acquaintance with the details of the original discoveries in mathematics of the greatest mathematician of antiquity, perhaps the neatest mathematical genius that the world has ever seen. History and tradition know Archimedes almost ex¬ clusively as the inventor of a number of ingenious mechanical appliances, things which naturally appeal more to the popular imagination than the subtleties of pure mathematics. Almost all that is told of Archimedes reaches us through the accounts by Polybius and Plutarch of the siege of Syracuse by Marcellus. He perished in the sack of that city in 212 B.C., and, as he was then an old man (0
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