![]() ![]() In case you were not really listening in maths lessons at school, you can take it from me that it is impossible to design anything from a road to a car to a house or anything else without relying on this branch of mathematics. Newton and Leibniz argued bitterly over who had invented calculus first in the 17th century, but the reading by X-ray of the Archimedes palimpsest in the 1990s proves Archimedes beat them both by over 2,000 years. To do this he invented integral calculus. Archimedes screws are still used in Sicily in the salt works, to pump sea water from one pool to another as it progressively evaporates until it leaves nothing but pure edible salt crystals.Īrchimedes created the mathematical formulae for calculating the volume of many solids, including those with curved surfaces. He originally invented this to pump water out of a large ship, and 2,000 years later one was used to pump water out of the world’s first ocean-going steamship in 1839, the SS Archimedes. As soon as a North African contemporary of Archimedes, named Eratosthenes, had worked out the size of the earth, Archimedes calculated the size of lever needed to move it, and told the king: “All I need is somewhere to stand, and I can move the earth.”Īrchimedes’ best known use of the six simple machines is the modification of the screw which came to be named after him, the Archimedes Screw. It is simply a spiral tube turned with a lever, which can force water to flow upwards against gravity. He also worked out the mathematical relationship between the power needed to operate a lever, its length, and the positioning of the fulcrum. He also made great innovations in astronomy, geometry, mechanics, hydrostatics and optics and he made far more inventions – certainly far more which actually worked – than Leonardo Da Vinci.Īrchimedes invented a system of ropes and pulleys with multiple gears, and used them to tow a fully manned and loaded galley up the beach all by himself, to show the king of Syracuse how gears can drastically multiply the strength of one person. The ancient Romans and Greeks considered Archimedes the greatest mathematician who had ever lived. ![]() Actually, it was the citizens of Syracuse in Sicily who were privileged to to see the bare wedding tackle of the world’s cleverest man.Īnd do you know he was messing about in the bath in order to solve a crime? Forget Inspector Montalbano Archimedes was Sicily’s first famous detective.Īrchimedes was born in 287 B.C. We all know the story of Archimedes flooding his bathroom, leaping out of his bath, and dashing stark naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!” in excitement at his discovery of the Archimedes Principle of water displacement.īut exactly which city’s streets did the world’s first flasher actually dash through?įor years I thought it was somewhere in Greece, since my maths teacher at school told me he was Greek. ![]()
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