📍Ortygia, 96100 Syracuse, Sicily, Italy
287 BC – 212 BC“I was born in Syracuse, then a great Greek city in Sicily, around 287 BC. My father, Phidias, was an astronomer, and from him I learned to watch the heavens and to love mathematics. Syracuse was rich and powerful, with its harbours, temples and the old heart of the city on the island of Ortygia, and I may have been related to its king, Hiero II, who was my friend and patron. As a young man I spent time in Alexandria, in Egypt, among the scholars of its great library, and I wrote to them for the rest of my life. But I returned home to Syracuse, and it was there that I did my greatest work: measuring the circle, calculating the area under curves, explaining the lever and the principles of floating bodies. Hiero brought me practical problems too. When he suspected that a goldsmith had cheated him on a crown, the story goes that I noticed the water rise as I stepped into my bath, realised how to measure the crown's volume, and ran through the streets shouting Eureka, I have found it. I designed pumps, pulleys and machines, and I boasted that if I had a place to stand, I could move the earth. When the Romans besieged Syracuse in 213 BC, I built machines to defend the city: catapults of every range and great claws that lifted ships out of the water. The siege lasted two years, and I was lost when the city finally fell. I had asked for a sphere inside a cylinder to be carved on my tomb, to mark the discovery I was proudest of. Long afterwards, the Roman Cicero searched for it, found it overgrown with brambles and had it cleaned, so that Syracuse would remember its mathematician.”
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