Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes

Synopsis

The extraordinary genius of Archimedes—scientist, mathematician, engineer, and showman.

Many of us know little about Archimedes other than his “Eureka” exclamation upon discovering that he could immerse an object in a full tub of water and measure the spillage to determine the object’s volume. That simple observation helped establish the key principles of buoyancy that govern the flotation of hot-air balloons, boats, and denizens of the sea.

Archimedes had a profound impact on the development of mathematics and science: from square roots to the stability of ships; number systems to levers; the value of pi to the size of the universe. Yet this same cerebral man developed machines of war that held at bay the greatest army of antiquity. Ironically, Archimedes’ reputation swelled to mythic proportions in the ancient world for his feats of engineering: the hand-cranked irrigation device—commonly known as “Archimedes’ screw”—and his ingenuous use of levers, pulleys, and ropes to launch, single-handedly, a fully laden ship!

His rediscovered treatises guided nascent thinkers out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. Indeed, Archimedes’ cumulative record of achievement places him among the exalted ranks of Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Eureka Man brings to life for general readers the genius of Archimedes, offering succinct and understandable explanations of some of his amazing discoveries and innovations.

Publishers Weekly

One of the most famous scientists of antiquity, Archimedes was renowned for his wizardry in pure mathematics as well as for applied science, building defensive devices that helped ancient Syracuse temporarily hold off a Roman assault.University of Massachusetts Dartmouth science prof Hirshfeld (The Electric Life of Michael Faraday) offers a lively look at the work underlying Archimedes' renown. The second part of the book shifts gears to trace the fortunes of the so-called Archimedes Palimpsest, a parchment with a Byzantine-era religious work written over an ancient text by Archimedes. Since it was rediscovered in the early 1900s, scientists have used ultraviolet and X-ray scanning techniques to identify the original underlying works, long believed lost, and uncover the startling fact that Archimedes discovered the calculus almost 2,000 years before Newton and Leibniz. Science fans will find this a quick read, and readers interested in the transmission of ancient manuscripts will be fascinated by Hirshfeld's account of the palimpsest (a tale also recounted in 2007's The Archimedes Codex). 8 pages of color illus., 15 b&w illus. (Sept.)