ARCHIMEDES. - The greatest mathematician, born in Syracuse in 287 BC, died during the siege of that city in 212 BC. The writings of Archimedes, in which the conceptions underlying the calculus and mechanics are preserved, were already studied and appreciated in Rome by Cicero, Titus Livy, Pliny, Vitruvius, and Boethius. They have come down to us through the Byzantines. They were taught in the schools of Constantinople by Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, the architects of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
In 1266 the two most important manuscripts, brought to Italy and preserved in the library of the Romans, 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 request of the mathematician Campanus of Novara, chaplain to the Pope. All other manuscripts studied in Europe are copies derived from these codices. In 1461 Pope Nicholas V had a more accurate Latin version made by the canon Jacopo da San Cassiano, a Cremonese, a pupil of Vittorino da Feltre.
In 1906 a third manuscript, written in the 10th century, was published; it had been discovered in the convent of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and was later preserved in the library of Constantinople.
While in antiquity, from the writers of the Bible up to Horace (Carm. I, 28), the grains of sand in the sea seemed too vast a number for the human mind to conceive (numerique carentes arenae), Archimedes in his *Arenarius*, addressed to King Gelon, after attempting 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 such a vast sphere, when written in the decimal system, would not exceed 54 digits.
Archimedes’ works, about thirty in number, constitute the starting point for the studies of the founders of the infinitesimal calculus. He succeeded in giving a rigorous meaning to the concepts of infinitesimal or indivisible quantities and of infinitely large quantities. His treatise on the equilibrium of planes and that on floating bodies provide an initial method for the a priori calculation of the stability of a ship.
De Arenae numero, Italian trans. by A. Mancini, in Il Pitagora, 5 (1899, 1); A. Favaro, A., Genoa 1912; E. Rufini, Il «Metodo» di A., Rome 1926; G. Loria, A., Milan 1928; E. Fermi, s.V. ENOCH. Ital., IV, p. 48.