WEEK’S BIOGRAPHY 1

Archimedes
By Snapes_girl

Archimedes is to this day known as one of the greatest and most inflential mathematicians ever to live. He has accomplished many great things in his life. He was born in 287 BC in the seaport colony Syracuse, Magna Graecia which is now known as Sicily. His Father was an astronomer named Phidias.

Archimedes was a great man and was accomplished in many fields. He was an astronomer, a philosopher, physicist, engineer and a hellenistic mathematician. His scientific abililities were extremly accomplished. He helped to shape the field of physics and practical engineering. Many think that he is one of the greatest scientists ever to live. He is famous for one of the quotes he wrote, "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world."

Archimedes uncle was the King of Syracuse, King Hiero II. The king appointed Archimedes to design and build a new fleet of ships for his navy. He was a master in the art of floatation and developed the Archimedes principle. He discovered the principal while taking a bath. Once he discovered this theory, he ran into the streets naked exclaiming, "Eureka!" He also had him design a luxury supply war barge. During the creating of these water dwellers, Archimedes is said to have invented a pulley system and the Archimedes screw. This screw closely resembles the common day screws we use today.

Apon doing the designing of the ships for the king and helping along with the war Archimedes popularity increased. He helped to hold the Roman's at bay with war machine's that he himself designed. He discovered that using large sheilds and pointing them at the Roman's twards the sunlight acted like a blinder, making the on coming enemies unable to see and causing the ships to catch on fire. This was known as Archimedes death ray. Although the ememies were blinded by the reflections from the shields, there is a lot of speculation by modern scientists that the ships actually caught on fire.


Although Archimedes is better known for his math and engineering skills, he was also a very accompilshed astronomer. He became interested in the science as a young boy, watching his Father work. Because of this Archimedes was quite knowledgeable on the subject at a young age. He blended his knowledge in both astronomy and geometry to accurately find the circumference of the earth, within a few hundred miles. He built a great maching to measure the angels of the rising sun and this machine helped him to correctly calculate the length of the year. The Greek year was, at that time calculated by the phases of the moon, and his machine helped him to figure this out.

Archimedes was killed in 212 BC by a Roman soldier in the second Punic war despite the Roman General Marcellus telling his soldiers to not harm Archimedes. It is said he was sitting in the sand performing a geometric construction. He was drawing a diagram in the sand and was becoming impatient with the soldiers approaching. A Greek soldier becam outraged at this and killed Archimedes. It is said in ledgend that Archimedes last words were, "Don't disturb my circles."

( Sources used)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes

http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/bios/b2archimedes_p1ab.htm

Euclid:

Euclid of Alexandria is one of the most prominent mathematicians in ancient history, especially due to his treatsie on The Elements He is best known for being a mathematics teacher, teaching at Alexandria in Egypt.

There is actually not that much known about his history, and what is known is unreliable. Since Euclid was a common name at the time, it is even harder to track down the life of Euclid the matehmatician. He is often confused with Euclid of Megara. Therefore, there are several hypothesis about Euclid the person.

Hypothesis 1) Euclid was a historical character who wrote The Elements and all other works that was attributed to him. (This is the most popular theory.)

Hypothesis 2) Euclid was the leader of a team of mathematicians working at Alexandria that attributed all their works to Euclid after his death. Why they would do such a thing, I do not know.

Hypothesis 3) Euclid never existed. The team of mathematicians took their works and used the name Euclid, using the name of Euclid of Megara (mentioned earlier), who had lived about 100 years prior to the Euclid of Alexandria.

There is strong evidence to accept all three hypothesis. For Hypothesis 1, the theory had been accepted for over 2000 years and there is little evidence inconsistent with this hypothesis, except for the small differences in style in the works, but all authors may vary in their style, especially since Euclid did base some of his works in The Elements off previous writers.

However, we know that Euclid had a vigorous school of mathematics at Alexandria. Therefore, there is no doubt that he had students wo may have helped write the books. Other than the differences in writing style, there is not much evidence that supports this hypothesis.

Hypothesis 3 might sound very strange and fanciful, but history has shown that it is possible. However, who were the people in the Euclid group? Almost every other group like this in hisotry was made up of mathematicians who were famous already by their own right.

As mentioned before, Euclid's most famous work is The Elements. This book was a compilation of mathematical knowledge. It is uncertain if any of the book was originally proved by Euclid, but the organization and exposition is definately his. He also introduces definitions that have never been used before.

The Elements is divided into 13 books. Books one to six deal with plane geometry, detailing triangles, parallelograms, rectangles, squares, the circle, proportion, and other geometric parts of mathematics. Books seven to nine deal with number theory. They show the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers.
Books eleven to thirteen deal with three-dimensional geometry. He gives the definitions for the dimentions. The Elements ends with book thirteen which discusses the properties of the five regular polyhedra and gives a proof that there are precisely five. This book appears to be based largely on an earlier treatise by Theaetetus.

Euclid also worked on astronomy. He realized that fixed stars always rise from the smae place and set at the same place, stars that rise at the same time always rise at the same time, etc. He realized that this can only happen with objects with circular motion, when the eye is equally distant from the circumference. Thus, he assumed that fixed stars move circularly, and fastened in one body. He realized that the universe is spherical in shape. If the universe was a cylinder or a cone, the stars would not always make semicircular paths and would not have these properties.

His contributions to astronomy were mainy his geometric forms of the sphere and circle, which eventually led to many different discoveries, such as Kepler's law, which realized that the universe's orbits are not perfect cricles, but are more like ellipses: circles are a degenerate form of ellipses.

Sources: Source 1
Source 2