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Archimedes

10 stories mention Archimedes on DeadlyCurious.

The Footnote June 27, 2026 · Syracuse, Sicily

The Syracusan Mathematician Who Ran Naked Through the Streets in About 250 BCE Shouting Eureka After Working Out the Principle of Displacement in His Bath

Archimedes was asked by King Hiero II of Syracuse to determine whether a goldsmith had fraudulently substituted silver for some of the gold in a royal crown. The principle of displacement — that a submerged body displaces a volume of water equal to its own volume — occurred to Archimedes in the public bath. He reportedly ran home shouting "Eureka!" without dressing. The first surviving record of the story is Vitruvius, two centuries later.

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The Footnote June 25, 2026 · Syracuse, Sicily

The Syracusan Mirror System That May or May Not Have Set Fire to the Roman Fleet

Classical and medieval tradition holds that Archimedes used a system of polished bronze mirrors to focus sunlight on the Roman ships besieging Syracuse, setting them on fire. The story is first attested 350 years after the siege. Modern experimental reconstructions have produced ambiguous results.

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The Footnote June 25, 2026 · Chios

The Fifth-Century BC Mathematician Whose Work on Lunes Was the First Successful Quadrature of a Curved Figure

Hippocrates of Chios was a Greek geometer of the late 5th century BC — not the famous physician of Cos. He was the first European mathematician to compute the exact area of a region bounded by curves, an achievement that opened the path Eudoxus and Archimedes would later complete with the method of exhaustion.

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The Cabinet June 25, 2026 · Syracuse, Sicily

The Roman General Who Wept When He Saw the City His Army Had Just Sacked and Personally Mourned the Mathematician It Had Killed

Marcus Claudius Marcellus took Syracuse in 212 BC after a two-year siege. He had ordered Archimedes spared. He arrived at the mathematician's house to find him dead by a Roman soldier's spear. Marcellus had the killer executed, gave Archimedes a state funeral, and is recorded as having wept publicly at the destruction of the captured city.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Samos, Aegean Sea

The Greek Astronomer Who Proposed the Heliocentric Model Eighteen Centuries Before Copernicus

Aristarchus of Samos proposed around 270 BC that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around. The classical and late-antique Greek astronomical mainstream — including Hipparchus and Ptolemy — rejected the proposal on empirical grounds. The work survives only through a single passage in Archimedes.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Syracuse, Sicily

The Roman Quaestor Who Found Archimedes's Forgotten Tomb at Syracuse in 75 BC

Cicero served as quaestor at Syracuse in 75 BC and used his Roman authority to clear a brambled rural cemetery looking for the tomb of Archimedes, dead 137 years earlier. He found it. The Syracusan locals had forgotten which one was the tomb of the greatest mathematician of antiquity.

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The Footnote June 11, 2026 · Cnidus (modern Datça), Caria, Anatolia

The Greek Who Made Geometry Honest

Before Eudoxus, Greek mathematicians could prove statements about simple shapes. Eudoxus invented the method that let them prove statements about curves.

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The Cabinet June 11, 2026 · Syracuse, Sicily (then Magna Graecia)

The Soldier Who Killed Archimedes

After two years of siege, the Romans broke into Syracuse. A junior soldier found a seventy-five-year-old man drawing in the sand and made the worst mistake of his career.

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The Cabinet June 10, 2026 · Syracuse, Sicily (then Magna Graecia)

What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton

He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.

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The Footnote June 9, 2026 · Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre, Istanbul, Turkey

The Prayer Book That Was a Math Textbook

In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.

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