Ancient greek mathematicians archimedes biography

His contributions in geometry revolutionised the subject and his methods anticipated the integral calculus.

What did archimedes discover

He was a practical man who invented a wide variety of machines including pulleys and the Archimidean screw pumping device. View twelve larger pictures. Biography Archimedes ' father was Phidias, an astronomer. We know nothing else about Phidias other than this one fact and we only know this since Archimedes gives us this information in one of his works, The Sandreckoner.

A friend of Archimedes called Heracleides wrote a biography of him but sadly this work is lost. How our knowledge of Archimedes would be transformed if this lost work were ever found, or even extracts found in the writing of others. Archimedes was a native of Syracuse, Sicily. It is reported by some authors that he visited Egypt and there invented a device now known as Archimedes' screw.

This is a pump, still used in many parts of the world.

When was archimedes born

It is highly likely that, when he was a young man, Archimedes studied with the successors of Euclid in Alexandria. Certainly he was completely familiar with the mathematics developed there, but what makes this conjecture much more certain, he knew personally the mathematicians working there and he sent his results to Alexandria with personal messages.

He regarded Conon of Samos , one of the mathematicians at Alexandria, both very highly for his abilities as a mathematician and he also regarded him as a close friend. In the preface to On spirals Archimedes relates an amusing story regarding his friends in Alexandria. He tells us that he was in the habit of sending them statements of his latest theorems, but without giving proofs.