Category: Biographies
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 nak...
In order to enable the reader to arrive at a correct understanding of the place of Archimedes and of the significance of his work it is necessary to pass in review the course of...
6. Book II begins with the problem of finding a sphere equal in volume to agiven cone or cylinder; this requires the solution of the problem of the two mean proportionals, which is accordingly assumed. Prop. 2 deduces, by means of 1., 44, an expression...
4. CHAPTER IV.The famous French geometer, Chasles, drew an instructive distinction between the predominant features of the geometry of the two great successors of Euclid, namely, Archimedes a...
1. CHAPTER I.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:...
7. CHAPTER V.The _Sandreckoner_ deserves a place by itself. It is not mathematically very important; but it is an arithmetical curiosity which illustrates the versatility and genius of Archi...
3. CHAPTER III.The range of Archimedes's writings will be gathered from the list of his various treatises. An extraordinarily large proportion of their contents represents entirely new discove...
11. CHAPTER VII.The science of hydrostatics is, even more than that of statics, the original creation of Archimedes. In hydrostatics he seems to have had no predecessors. Only one of the facts...
5. Book I. begins with a preface addressed to Dositheus (a pupil of Conon),which reminds him that on a former occasion he had communicated to him the treatise proving that any segment of a "section of a right-angled cone" (i.e. a parabola) is four-thir...
9. Book I., the rest of the treatise is devoted to finding the centre ofgravity of certain figures. There is no dynamics in the work and therefore no room for the parallelogram of velocities, which is given with a fairly adequate proof in the Aristo...
12. Book II. is a geometrical _tour de force_. Here, by the methods of puregeometry, Archimedes investigates the positions of rest and stability of a right segment of a paraboloid of revolution floating with its base upwards or downwards (but completel...
8. CHAPTER VI.It is said that Archytas was the first to treat mechanics in a systematic way by the aid of mathematical principles; but no trace survives of any such work by him. In practical...
10. Book II., in ten propositions, is entirely devoted to finding the centre