Archimedes - The Man Who Ran Naked in the Street

by Read Listen Learn

Archimedes - The Man Who Ran Naked in the Street

Archimedes is one of the most famous mathematicians of all time and, perhaps, the first engineer. Although he spoke and wrote Greek, he lived in Syracuse in Sicily, now a part of Italy, and probably never visited Greece.

Archimedes was born about 287 B.C.E. We know nothing about his childhood but perhaps he studied at the greatest library in the world at that time in Alexandria in Egypt. But we don’t know for sure. We’re just guessing.

We know Archimedes very well today because of some stories about him. The difficulty is that they’re probably not true. The best example is when he got a great idea in the bath that helped him to understand a scientific problem. He was so excited that he jumped out and ran down the street. He was shouting “Eureka!” (or “Hooray!” in English). Of course, he was naked. Now we think it probably didn’t happen. But we know what the scientific problem was and we know that it was Archimedes who found the answer.

The king had some gold and he wanted to make a crown for himself. He gave the gold to a craftsman and got his crown. But the king was clever and asked himself: did the craftsman keep some of the gold and put a cheaper metal (like silver) in it? He asked Archimedes to find out if this was true.

The idea that Archimedes had when he got into his bath was that the amount of water that comes out of a bath when you put an object into it is the same as the volume of the object.

So, the great mathematician weighed the crown and then got a piece of gold of the same weight and put it in a full glass of water. He saw how much water came out of the glass and then did the same thing with a piece of silver that weighed the same as the piece of gold. Because the silver was lighter than the gold, the piece was bigger and more water came out of the glass.

Archimedes then put the crown in the water. Again, more water came out than when he put the gold in so he knew that the crown was not just made of gold. There was also silver in it. We don’t know what happened to the craftsman but it was probably not a very nice day for him when he saw the king again.

Archimedes was also interested in the effect of weight, volume and shape on how objects float and if a ship was going to sink. Why did Archimedes want to know this? The King of Syracuse needed to understand how to build the best ships because the Romans wanted to take the city for their empire. Because Sicily is an island, they had to come in ships and so the Greeks needed better ships to stop them.

So, Archimedes worked hard to solve the problems of his king and city. For example, he made catapults to use against the Roman ships. To do this, he needed to know how much weight to put on a lever and where to put it. In this way, he understood that a small weight can move a greater weight. It all depends where you put the weights. It’s like a seesaw in a children’s playground. A small child can sit on one end of the seesaw and move a fat man on the other side – but the fat man must be nearer to the centre.

The story about catapults is probably true. But there are also stories about Archimedes using mirrors and glass and burning Roman ships with the sun. They’re probably not true.

In 212 B.C.E., the Romans took Syracuse. Archimedes was thinking about a mathematical problem when they came into the city. The Romans knew that Archimedes was very clever and could help them a lot. They did not want him dead. One story says that a Roman soldier killed him because Archimedes continued to work on circles – a maths problem – and said he had no time to see the Roman general. And so Archimedes died.

The Arabs translated his work into their language and later the Europeans translated the Arabic to Latin. That is how we know about Archimedes. He was teaching people – first, the Arabs and then Europeans – hundreds of years after his death.