ARCHIMEDES. - Supreme mathematician, b. at Syracuse in 287 B.C., d. in the siege of that city in 212 B.C. The writings of A., in which have been preserved the conceptions that underlie the infinitesimal calculus and mechanics, were already studied and appreciated at Rome by Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Vitruvius, Boethius. They have been handed down to us through the work of the Byzantines. They were the object of teaching in the schools of Constantinople by Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, architects of the cathedral of St. Sophia in Constantinople.
In 1266 the two most important codices, imported into Italy and preserved in the library of the Norman kings, were donated by Charles of Anjou to Pope Clement IV in Viterbo. A Flemish Dominican, William of Moerbeke, translated them into Latin at Viterbo in 1269, at the wish of the mathematician Campanus of Novara, chaplain of the Pope. All the other manuscripts studied in Europe are copies deriving from these codices. In 1461 Pope Nicholas V had a more accurate Latin version made from them by the canon Jacopo of S. Cassiano, of Cremona, a pupil of Vittorino da Feltre.
In 1906 a third codex written in the 10th century was published, discovered in the convent of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and afterwards preserved in the library of Constantinople.
Whereas in antiquity, from the writers of the Bible down to Horace (Carm. I, 28), the grains of sand of the sea seemed a number so great that it could not be thought by the human mind (numeroque carentes arenae), A. in his Arenarius, dedicated to King Gelon, after seeking to estimate the radius of the sphere of the fixed stars, according to the hypothesis of Aristarchus, demonstrates that the number of grains of sand that would fill so great a sphere, when written with the decimal system, would have no more than 54 digits.
The works of A., about thirty in number, constitute the starting point for the studies of the founders of the infinitesimal calculus. A. succeeded in giving a rigorous meaning to the concepts of infinitesimal, or indivisible, quantities and of infinitely great quantities. His writing on the equilibria of planes and that on floating bodies give a first method for the a priori calculation of the stability of a ship.
Bibliography6 works
Giovanni Vacca