Archimedes

:For other senses of this word, see Archimedes (disambiguation).

Quotes about Archimedes

• "Perhaps the best indication of what Archimedes truly loved most is his request that his tombstone include a cylinder circumscribing a sphere, accompanied by the inscription of his amazing theorem that the sphere is exactly two-thirds of the circumscribing cylinder in both surface area and volume!" (Laubenbacher and Pengelley, p. 95)¹
• "...but regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest efforts only to those studies the subtlety and charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity." Plutarch, possibly explaining why Archimedes produced no writings that describe precisely the design of his inventions. It has also been suggested that this statement merely reflects the prejudices of Plutarch and his peers, influenced by Platonic beliefs in pure reasoning and deduction over experimentation and inductive processes. Given Archimedes's prodigious output as an engineer, Plutarch's often quoted comments on him seem hard to believe by modern historians.