Archimedes
historical figure · 9 works · 10 mentions · 13 anchored passages
Archimedes of Syracuse
in the texts
Tusculan Disputations
Greek mathematician who constructed a mechanical sphere modeling the motions of the heavenly bodies.
For when Archimedes bound up in a sphere the motions of the moon, sun, and the five wandering stars, he brought about the same thing as he who, in the Timaeus, built the world — Plato's god — namely, that one revolution should govern motions most unlike in slowness and swiftness.
from the same city I shall summon a lowly little man from the dust and the rod, who lived many years afterward, Archimedes.
who is there of all who has but any commerce with the Muses, that is, with humanity and with learning, who would not rather be this mathematician than that tyrant?
Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England
Ancient mathematician invoked in simile for Bentham's moment of intellectual discovery.
At the sight of it, I cried out as it were in an inward ecstasy, like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principle of hydrostatics, Εὕρηκα.
Lucullus
Greek mathematician cited as capable of demonstrating geometrically that the sun is many times larger than the earth.
When I shall have conceded these to be true, if I should put the wise man to his oath — and not before Archimedes, while he looks on, has described all those reasonings by which it is made out that the sun is many times larger than the earth — do you think he would swear?
On Moral Ends
Greek mathematician cited as an example of total absorption in intellectual pursuit.
For what ardour of zeal do you think there was in Archimedes, who, while he was rather attentively drawing certain things in the dust, did not even feel that his country was taken?
On the Commonwealth
Syracusan mathematician and inventor of the celestial globes described in the dialogue.
and in this lay the admirable invention of Archimedes, that he had devised how a single revolution should preserve unequal and varied courses in motions most unlike.
For who can truly think that Dionysius did more, when by all his contrivance he tore liberty from his fellow citizens, than his fellow citizen Archimedes, when, seeming to do nothing, he wrought that very globe of which we were just now speaking?
for I hold in memory that Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, a most learned man, as you know, when this same thing was said to have been seen, and he chanced to be at the house of Marcus Marcellus, who had been consul with him, ordered to be brought out a celestial globe which the grandfather of that Marcellus had carried off from the captured city of Syracuse, that most wealthy and most adorned of cities—th …
On the Nature of the Gods
Mathematician credited with mechanical ingenuity, invoked ironically to highlight the absurdity of denying Nature's design.
and they think Archimedes had more power in imitating the revolutions of the sphere than Nature in producing them — especially when those revolutions were perfected with far more skill than these were copied.
Elements
Greek mathematician and physicist whose treatises (On the Sphere and Cylinder, Quadrature of the Parabola, the Method) are the principal source for attributing the method of exhaustion and related theorems to Eudoxus and Democritus.
The evidence for this attribution comes mainly from Archimedes.
The same sort of argument is used for solids, plane sections taking the place of straight lines.
Archimedes is careful to state once more that this method of argument does not constitute a proof.
Meditations
Mathematician and inventor listed among the illustrious dead.
and besides these Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes, and other keen, high-minded, laborious, cunning, and self-willed natures, mockers of the very mortal and fleeting life of men, such as Menippus and the like.
De Anima
Engineer/inventor whose water-organ is used as an analogy for the soul's unified operation through many parts.
for they too maintain the unity of the soul, which, diffused through the whole body and everywhere itself, like breath in a pipe through its holes, so flashes forth through the organs of sense in various ways — not so much cut up as dispensed.