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Archimedes

Archimedes

Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of antiquity, made his greatest contributions in geometry. His methods anticipated the integral calculus 2,000 years before Newton and Leibniz.

He was the son of the astronomer Phidias and was close to King Hieron and his son Gelon, for whom he served for many years. He was an accomplished engineer but loved pure mathematics.

Stories from Plutarch, Livy, and others describe machines invented by Archimedes for the defense of Syracuse. These include the catapult, the compound pulley and a burning-mirror.

Among Archimedes most famous works is Measurement of the Circle, in which he determined the exact value of pi to be between the values 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. This he obtained by circumscribing and inscribing a circle with regular polygons having 96 sides. However, he required the proof of two fundamental relations about the perimeters and areas of inscribed and circumscribed regular polygons.

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