Is God a Mathematician_ - Mario Livio [22]
I am using the term “magicians” here for those individuals who could pull rabbits out of literally empty hats; those who discovered never-before-thought-of connections between mathematics and nature; those who were able to observe complex natural phenomena and to distill from them crystal-clear mathematical laws. In some cases, these superior thinkers even used their experiments and observations to advance their mathematics. The question of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in explaining nature would never have arisen were it not for these magicians. This enigma was born directly out of the miraculous insights of these researchers.
No single book can do justice to all the superb scientists and mathematicians who have contributed to our understanding of the universe. In this chapter and the following one I intend to concentrate on only four of those giants of past centuries, about whose status as magicians there can be no doubt—some of the crème de la crème of the scientific world. The first magician on my list is best remembered for a rather unusual event—for dashing stark naked through the streets of his hometown.
Give Me a Place to Stand and I Will Move the Earth
When the historian of mathematics Eric Temple Bell had to decide whom to name as his top three mathematicians, he concluded:
Any list of the three “greatest” mathematicians of all history would include the name of Archimedes. The other two usually associated with him are Newton (1642–1727) and Gauss (1777–1855). Some, considering the relative wealth—or poverty—of mathematics and physical science in the respective ages in which these giants lived, and estimating their achievements against the background of their times, would put Archimedes first.
Archimedes (287–212 BC; figure 10 shows a bust claimed to represent Archimedes, but which may in fact be that of a Spartan king) was indeed the Newton or Gauss of his day; a man of such brilliance, imagination, and insight that both his contemporaries and the generations that followed him uttered his name in awe and reverence. Even though he is better known for his ingenious inventions in engineering, Archimedes was primarily a mathematician, and in his mathematics he was centuries ahead of his time. Unfortunately, little is known about Archimedes’ early life or his family. His first biography, written by one Heracleides, has not survived, and the few details that we do know about his life and violent death come primarily from the writings of the Roman historian Plutarch. Plutarch (ca. AD 46–120) was, in fact, more interested in the military accomplishments of the Roman general Marcellus, who conquered Archimedes’ home town of Syracuse in 212 BC. Fortunately for the history of mathematics, Archimedes had given Marcellus such a tremendous headache during the siege of Syracuse that the three major historians of the period, Plutarch, Polybius, and Livy, couldn’t ignore him.
Figure 10
Archimedes was born in Syracuse, then a Greek settlement in Sicily. According to his own testimony, he was the son of the astronomer Phidias, about whom little is known beyond the fact that he had estimated the ratio of the diameters of the Sun and the Moon. Archimedes may have also been related in some way to King Hieron II, himself the illegitimate son of a nobleman (by one of the latter’s female slaves). Irrespective of whichever ties Archimedes might have had with the royal family, both the king and his son, Gelon, always held Archimedes in high regard. As a youth, Archimedes spent some time in Alexandria, where he studied mathematics, before returning to a life of extensive research in Syracuse.
Archimedes was truly a mathematician’s mathematician. According to Plutarch, he regarded as sordid and ignoble “every art