Is God a Mathematician_ - Mario Livio [23]
Continually bewitched by a Siren who always accompanied him, he forgot to nourish himself and omitted to care for his body; and when, as would often happen, he was urged by force to bathe and anoint himself, he would still be drawing geometrical figures in the ashes or with his fingers would draw lines on his anointed body, being possessed by a great ecstasy and in truth a thrall to the Muses.
In spite of his contempt for applied mathematics, and the little importance that Archimedes himself attached to his engineering ideas, his resourceful inventions gained him even more popular fame than his mathematical genius.
The best-known legend about Archimedes further enhances his image as the stereotypical absentminded mathematician. This amusing story was first told by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the first century BC, and it goes like this: King Hieron wanted to consecrate a gold wreath to the immortal gods. When the wreath was delivered to the king, it was equal in weight to the gold furnished for its creation. The king was nonetheless suspicious that a certain amount of gold had been replaced by silver of the same weight. Not being able to substantiate his distrust, the king turned for advice to the master of mathematicians—Archimedes. One day, the legend continued, Archimedes stepped into a bath, while still engrossed in the problem of how to uncover potential fraud with the wreath. As he immersed himself in the water, however, he realized that his body displaced a certain volume of water, which overflowed the tub’s edge. This immediately triggered a solution in his head. Overwhelmed with joy, Archimedes jumped out of the tub and ran naked in the street shouting “Eureka, eureka!” (“I have found it, I have found it!”).
Another famous Archimedean exclamation, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth,” is currently featured (in one version or another) on more than 150,000 Web pages found in a Google search. This bold proclamation, sounding almost like the vision statement of a large corporation, has been cited by Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and John F. Kennedy and it was even featured in a poem by Lord Byron. The phrase was apparently the culmination of Archimedes’ investigations into the problem of moving a given weight with a given force. Plutarch tells us that when King Hieron asked for a practical demonstration of Archimedes’ ability to manipulate a large weight with a small force, Archimedes managed—using a compound pulley—to launch a fully loaded ship into the sea. Plutarch adds in admiration that “he drew the ship along smoothly and safely as if she were moving through the sea.” Slightly modified versions of the same legend appear in other sources. While it is difficult to believe that Archimedes could have actually moved an entire ship with the mechanical devices available to him at the time, the legends leave little room for doubt that he gave some impressive demonstration of an invention that enabled him to maneuver heavy weights.
Archimedes made many other peacetime inventions, such as a hydraulic screw for raising water and a planetarium that demonstrated the motions of the heavenly bodies, but he became most famous in antiquity for his role in the defense of Syracuse against the Romans.
Wars have always been popular with historians. Consequently, the events of the Roman siege on Syracuse during the years 214–212 BC have been lavishly chronicled by many historians. The Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus (ca. 268–208 BC), by then of considerable military fame, anticipated a rapid victory. He apparently failed to consider a stubborn King Hieron, aided by a mathematical and engineering genius. Plutarch