Archimedes

__Archimedes __  __By: andrewt848 __ **Background Information **  Archimedes was born in 287 BC. He was born and grew up in Syracuse, Italy. When he started his career as a mathematician and a scientist he started out in Egypt but then moved back to Syracuse where he made most of his discoveries.

**What Did He Do? **   **Science ** Archimedes was known for making many things that helped out his town and people in his town. One thing that people use all the time that he made was the lever. He used the lever to create the catapult which helped Syracuse survive through many attacks. He also created a mirror that burned enemy ships using the sun’s rays.  The king asked for a crown made completely of gold and gave one of his servants a chunk of  gold. When he got the crown back he didn't think it was completely made of gold so he hired Archimedes to see if it was really made of gold. Archimedes figured out that everything displaces a certain amount of water. He put in a chunk of gold in a container of water and a chunk of silver with the same mass in a container with the same amount of water and learned that the gold displaced more water than the silver. When he put the crown in the water it didn't displace as much water as the amount of gold it was supposed to be made out of. So he knew it was not made with all of the gold.  Archimedes also made something now called Archimedes screw. The purpose of Archimedes screw was to transport wart uphill. It helped get water from one place to the next even if you had to go uphill. He also made the discovery of the center of gravity. The center of gravity is the point in an object where there is an equal amount of weight on each side. This is also known as the balancing point because this is the point of the object where it balances.

**Math **  Archimedes was also known as a mathematician His biggest achievement in math was the perfection of the method of exhaustion. The method of exhaustion is how to calculate the area and volume of curved figured. With this Archimedes came up with a value for pi which was not perfected until many years later.

**Interesting Facts **  Archimedes was known as the greatest mathematician in ancient Greece. He made his law of buoyancy (how objects displace water) by getting in the bathtub and noticing that the water level rose. People found that inscribed on his tomb was a sphere and a cylinder which stood for the ratios he made.

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 14pt;">What Being a Scientist in the Early Days Was Like ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Archimedes was one of the first scientists ever. Science was nothing like it is today. There were no fancy tools and machines it was all just studying how things work and doing very basic experiments. Scientists back ten didn't really have a certain area that they worked in, they just did things because they were interested or they wanted to help solve a problem.

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 14pt;">Resources Used ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">Bendick, Jeanne. //Archimedes and the Door of Science.// Warsaw: ND Bethlehem Books, 1995. Print. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;"> "**Archimedes.**" //Britannica School.// Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2013. Web. 6 Sep. 2013. < [] >. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">Archimedes. //The Grolier Library of Science Biographies//. Ed. John Daintith. Vol. 1. Danbury: Grolier, 1997. Print. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">Farndon, John. //The Great Scientists.// New York:Barns and Noble, 2005. Print.