Late great engineers: Archimedes of Syracuse

"Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” These are supposed to be the words of the greatest scientist of antiquity, and yet, as with so much about Archimedes of Syracuse, it is virtually impossible to separate myth from reality.

The legendary flash of bath-time inspiration – the original ‘eureka’ moment that we were taught at school – while almost certainly apocryphal, has passed indelibly into science folklore. It remains popular as the only incident of public nudity related to the history of hydrostatics, and yet is unlikely to have been the inspiration for Archimedes’ two-volume treatise On Floating Bodies. As one biographer, Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis puts it: “the overflowing of water from the bath does not teach anything about the upward thrust acting on a body immersed in water.”

Today, Archimedes’ legacy rests on a vague portfolio of ideas: he anticipated calculus, formulated the eponymous hydrostatic principle, developed the design of the screw pump and devised an approach to determining π (pi) that was to be used for more than a thousand years, while one of the bounds he established for π (22/7) has remained a universal approximation ever since.