Archimedes | Facts & Biography - Britannica

His works

There are nine extant treatises by Archimedes in Greek. The principal results in On the Sphere and Cylinder (in two books) are that the surface area of any sphere of radius r is four times that of its greatest circle (in modern notation, S = 4πr2) and that the volume of a sphere is two-thirds that of the cylinder in which it is inscribed (leading immediately to the formula for the volume, V = 4/3πr3). Archimedes was proud enough of the latter discovery to leave instructions for his tomb to be marked with a sphere inscribed in a cylinder. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bce) found the tomb, overgrown with vegetation, a century and a half after Archimedes’ death.

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Measurement of the Circle is a fragment of a longer work in which π (pi), the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is shown to lie between the limits of 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. Archimedes’ approach to determining π, which consists of inscribing and circumscribing regular polygons with a large number of sides, was followed by everyone until the development of infinite series expansions in India during the 15th century and in Europe during the 17th century. That work also contains accurate approximations (expressed as ratios of integers) to the square roots of 3 and several large numbers.

On Conoids and Spheroids deals with determining the volumes of the segments of solids formed by the revolution of a conic section (circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola) about its axis. In modern terms, those are problems of integration. (See calculus.) On Spirals develops many properties of tangents to, and areas associated with, the spiral of Archimedes—i.e., the locus of a point moving with uniform speed along a straight line that itself is rotating with uniform speed about a fixed point. It was one of only a few curves beyond the straight line and the conic sections known in antiquity.

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On the Equilibrium of Planes (or Centres of Gravity of Planes; in two books) is mainly concerned with establishing the centers of gravity of various rectilinear plane figures and segments of the parabola and the paraboloid. The first book purports to establish the “law of the lever” (magnitudes balance at distances from the fulcrum in inverse ratio to their weights), and it is mainly on the basis of that treatise that Archimedes has been called the founder of theoretical mechanics. Much of that book, however, is undoubtedly not authentic, consisting as it does of inept later additions or reworkings, and it seems likely that the basic principle of the law of the lever and—possibly—the concept of the center of gravity were established on a mathematical basis by scholars earlier than Archimedes. His contribution was rather to extend those concepts to conic sections.

Quadrature of the Parabola demonstrates, first by “mechanical” means (as in Method, discussed below) and then by conventional geometric methods, that the area of any segment of a parabola is 4/3 of the area of the triangle having the same base and height as that segment. That is, again, a problem in integration.

The Sand-Reckoner is a small treatise that is a jeu d’esprit written for the layperson—it is addressed to Gelon, son of Hieron—that nevertheless contains some profoundly original mathematics. Its object is to remedy the inadequacies of the Greek numerical notation system by showing how to express a huge number—the number of grains of sand that it would take to fill the whole of the universe. What Archimedes does, in effect, is to create a place-value system of notation, with a base of 100,000,000. (That was apparently a completely original idea, since he had no knowledge of the contemporary Babylonian place-value system with base 60.) The work is also of interest because it gives the most detailed surviving description of the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 bce) and because it contains an account of an ingenious procedure that Archimedes used to determine the Sun’s apparent diameter by observation with an instrument.

Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems describes a process of discovery in mathematics. It is the sole surviving work from antiquity, and one of the few from any period, that deals with this topic. In it Archimedes recounts how he used a “mechanical” method to arrive at some of his key discoveries, including the area of a parabolic segment and the surface area and volume of a sphere. The technique consists of dividing each of two figures into an infinite but equal number of infinitesimally thin strips, then “weighing” each corresponding pair of these strips against each other on a notional balance to obtain the ratio of the two original figures. Archimedes emphasizes that, though useful as a heuristic method, this procedure does not constitute a rigorous proof.

On Floating Bodies (in two books) survives only partly in Greek, the rest in medieval Latin translation from the Greek. It is the first known work on hydrostatics, of which Archimedes is recognized as the founder. Its purpose is to determine the positions that various solids will assume when floating in a fluid, according to their form and the variation in their specific gravities. In the first book various general principles are established, notably what has come to be known as Archimedes’ principle: a solid denser than a fluid will, when immersed in that fluid, be lighter by the weight of the fluid it displaces. The second book is a mathematical tour de force unmatched in antiquity and rarely equaled since. In it Archimedes determines the different positions of stability that a right paraboloid of revolution assumes when floating in a fluid of greater specific gravity, according to geometric and hydrostatic variations.

Archimedes is known, from references of later authors, to have written a number of other works that have not survived. Of particular interest are treatises on catoptrics, in which he discussed, among other things, the phenomenon of refraction; on the 13 semiregular (Archimedean) polyhedra (those bodies bounded by regular polygons, not necessarily all of the same type, that can be inscribed in a sphere); and the “Cattle Problem” (preserved in a Greek epigram), which poses a problem in indeterminate analysis, with eight unknowns. In addition to those, there survive several works in Arabic translation ascribed to Archimedes that cannot have been composed by him in their present form, although they may contain “Archimedean” elements. Those include a work on inscribing the regular heptagon in a circle; a collection of lemmas (propositions assumed to be true that are used to prove a theorem) and a book, On Touching Circles, both having to do with elementary plane geometry; and the Stomachion (parts of which also survive in Greek), dealing with a square divided into 14 pieces for a game or puzzle.

Archimedes’ mathematical proofs and presentation exhibit great boldness and originality of thought on the one hand and extreme rigor on the other, meeting the highest standards of contemporary geometry. While the Method shows that he arrived at the formulas for the surface area and volume of a sphere by “mechanical” reasoning involving infinitesimals, in his actual proofs of the results in Sphere and Cylinder he uses only the rigorous methods of successive finite approximation that had been invented by Eudoxus of Cnidus in the 4th century bce. These methods, of which Archimedes was a master, are the standard procedure in all his works on higher geometry that deal with proving results about areas and volumes. Their mathematical rigor stands in strong contrast to the “proofs” of the first practitioners of integral calculus in the 17th century, when infinitesimals were reintroduced into mathematics. Yet Archimedes’ results are no less impressive than theirs. The same freedom from conventional ways of thinking is apparent in the arithmetical field in Sand-Reckoner, which shows a deep understanding of the nature of the numerical system.

Quick Facts Born: c. 287 bce, Syracuse, Sicily [Italy] (Show more) Died: 212/211 bce, Syracuse (Show more) Inventions: Archimedes screw (Show more) Notable Works: “Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems” (Show more) Subjects Of Study: Archimedes’ principle hydrostatics pi positional numeral system sphere surface lever volume (Show more) On the Web: Heritage History - The Inventor Archimedes (Feb. 13, 2026) (Show more) See all related content Show More

In antiquity Archimedes was also known as an outstanding astronomer: his observations of solstices were used by Hipparchus (flourished c. 140 bce), the foremost ancient astronomer. Very little is known of this side of Archimedes’ activity, although Sand-Reckoner reveals his keen astronomical interest and practical observational ability. There has, however, been handed down a set of numbers attributed to him giving the distances of the various heavenly bodies from Earth, which has been shown to be based not on observed astronomical data but on a “Pythagorean” theory associating the spatial intervals between the planets with musical intervals. Surprising though it is to find those metaphysical speculations in the work of a practicing astronomer, there is good reason to believe that their attribution to Archimedes is correct.