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Archimedes

Archimedes

c. 287 BCE–c. 212 BCE · Syracuse (Sicily)

Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BCE) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, and engineer active in Syracuse, Sicily. He developed methods for calculating areas and volumes that anticipated integral calculus, including the quadrature of the parabola and an approximation of pi, and formulated principles of hydrostatics and the law of the lever. He corresponded with Alexandrian scholars, and several of his treatises survive, among them "Quadrature of the Parabola" and "The Method of Mechanical Theorems," the latter addressed to Eratosthenes. He is also credited with mechanical inventions and defensive engines used during the Roman siege of Syracuse, where he was killed.

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“Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.”
Pappus of Alexandria, Synagoge (Collection) 8.1060 (Hultsch); cf. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Physica 1110.5

Did you know?

  • Archimedes and China's first emperor were contemporaries

    While Archimedes was working out his geometry and designing war-machines at Syracuse, Qin Shi Huang was unifying China and commissioning the Terracotta Army for his tomb. The two were contemporaries for decades and died within two years of each other.

    How we know

    Archimedes c. 287–212 BCE; Qin Shi Huang 259–210 BCE (unified China 221 BCE). Overlap 259–212 BCE = 47 years; deaths 2 years apart.

  • There really was an ancient “geared computer”

    Cicero records that Archimedes built a bronze mechanism that modeled the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. Such precision gearing was long doubted — until the Antikythera mechanism, a real geared astronomical calculator dated to roughly 150–100 BCE, was recovered from a Greek shipwreck, proving the ancient Greeks actually built them.

    How we know

    Archimedes 287–212 BCE; Cicero (106–43 BCE) describes the device in De re publica; the Antikythera mechanism is dated c. 150–100 BCE, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901.

  • Archimedes was killed mid-theorem — and Cicero later found his lost tomb

    When Rome took Syracuse in 212 BCE, Archimedes was cut down by a Roman soldier — reportedly while absorbed in a geometric diagram — even though the general had ordered his life be spared. More than a century later, Cicero hunted down and restored his neglected, overgrown tomb.

    How we know

    Archimedes d. 212 BCE at the fall of Syracuse; Cicero located and restored the tomb as quaestor in Sicily in 75 BCE — 137 years later. The “death by diagram” is one of several ancient traditions (Plutarch).

  • Archimedes was doing calculus-style math about 1,900 years too early

    In a treatise later called The Method, Archimedes (c. 287–212 BCE) used infinitesimal, calculus-like reasoning — summing infinitely many wafer-thin slices — to find areas and volumes, roughly nineteen centuries before Newton and Leibniz formalized the calculus in the late 1600s. The work was effectively lost until the medieval manuscript carrying it, the Archimedes Palimpsest, was rediscovered in 1906.

    How we know

    Archimedes c. 287–212 BCE; The Method (addressed to Eratosthenes) c. 250 BCE; Newton/Leibniz calculus c. 1666–1680s → gap ≈ 1,900 yrs. The Method survives via the Archimedes Palimpsest, rediscovered 1906.

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Syracuse (Sicily)Magna Graecia

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

About Syracuse (Sicily)

The greatest Greek city of the West—a Corinthian colony that grew into a Mediterranean superpower, fended off both Athens and Carthage, and gave the world the comic poet Epicharmus and the towering genius of Archimedes.

In Syracuse (Sicily) at the same time

Theocritus

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Archimedes’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Theocritus

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Archimedes’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

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