Who is Archimedes?

Before anything else, there’s something I’d like to ask…

If you answered no, well, I didn’t either. That was until I joined the camp blog. Because of the blogging activity, I came across an article on Archimedes. I was amazed at how a person’s intellect can come up with ideas beyond our expectations and now, I’ll share the wealth.

Archimedes is considered as one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time. His greatest contributions to mathematics were on the field of Geometry. He wished to have a monument of a sphere enclosed by a cylinder as his tombstone.

With a cylinder and a sphere, he was able to discover such an important concept of spheres: its surface area.

Source: math.about.com

Some of his contributions are:

• Determined the exact value of pi.
• Principle of Bouyancy.
• Powers of ten or Scientific Notation.
• Volume of a Sphere
• Surface Area of a Sphere

More about Archimedes…

Archimedes -www.cs.drexel.edu

Tomb of Archimedes -www.math.nyu.edu

Archimedes: Discoveries -www.lycos.com

Back to Top…

www.cs.drexel.edu

Discover Archimedes’ Discovery

Try this out:

Roll a gift wrapper around a ball, making a cylinder with a height equal to the diameter of the ball.

Unroll the cylinder and try to cover the ball with it.

Does it fit?

Did you know that Archimedes was the one who discovered that  a cylinder with the same diameter as a sphere, and a height with the same length as the diameter has equal surface areas? He identified the formula for this as:

4πr²

 

 

  

Know more: How the formula for the area of the sphere was  derived

courtesy of: thinkquest.com

 

 

I noticed that the formula for the surface area of a sphere is equal to four times the area of a circle… I researched about it and look what I found!

Watch this!

 

Amazing right?

courtesy of: BabelMath

Back to top…

What’s the big deal?

Look at these pictures: O.o

Balls, globe, fish bowl, water tank…. What do these pictures have in common?

Yes, obviously they’re all spherical in shape.^_^

But how do you make each one?

Surely, you start with the materials. How much material is to be used?

Now that’s when Archimedes’ discovery of the surface area of the sphere is applied!

Imagine: If Archimedes wasn’t so obsessed with Geometry and hadn’t discovered the formula for the surface area of a sphere, how would we be able to determine how much material to use for a certain object?

Trust me, we have a lot to thank Archimedes for.

“Thank you Archimedes!”

Back to Top…