ARCHIMEDE. — Great mathematician, born at Syracuse in 287 B.C., died during the siege of that city in 212 B.C. The writings of A., in which the conceptions underlying infinitesimal calculus and mechanics have been preserved for us, were already studied and esteemed at Rome by Cicero, Titus Livius, Pliny, Vitruvius, and Boethius. They were transmitted to us through the Byzantines. They were the subject of instruction in the schools of Constantinople by Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, architects of the cathedral of S. Sofia in Constantinople.
In 1266 the two most important codices, brought to Italy and preserved in the library of the Norman kings, were given by Charles of Anjou to Pope Clement IV at Viterbo. A Flemish Dominican, William of Moerbeke, translated them into Latin at Viterbo in 1269, at the request of the mathematician Campano da Novara, the Pope’s chaplain. All the other manuscripts studied in Europe are copies derived from these codices. In 1461 Pope Nicholas V had a more accurate Latin version prepared by the canon Jacopo da S. Cassiano, from Cremona, a pupil of Vittorino da Feltre.
In 1906 a third codex, written in the tenth century, was published; it had been discovered in the convent of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and was subsequently preserved in the library of Constantinople.
Whereas in antiquity, from the biblical writers to Horace (Carm. I, 28), the grains of sand in the sea seemed so numerous that they could not be conceived by the human mind (numeroque carentes arenae), A., in his Arenarius, dedicated 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 a sphere so large, if written in the decimal system, would contain no more than 54 digits.
The works of A., numbering approximately thirty, constitute the point of departure for the studies of the founders of infinitesimal calculus. A. succeeded in giving a rigorous meaning to the concepts of infinitesimal, or indivisible, quantities and 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 a ship’s stability.