Archimedes, Euler, Gauss, Newton & Einstein
Archimedes was a native of Syracuse, Sicily, and he spent his early life studying under the tutelage of the successors of Euclid (Archimedes 1). Archimedes was employed by the King to build machines of war to help keep the Romans at bay. While Archimedes had success in engineering these machines such as the compound pulley and other engines of war, his interest was purely from a mathematical point-of-view “These machines Archimedes had designed and contrived, not as matters of any importance, but as mere amusements in geometry” (Archimedes 2).
Archimedes’ accomplishments in mathematics theory caused him to be considered as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time by historians, accomplishments which included perfecting methods of integration, the method of exhaustion, fundamental theorems pertaining to the center of gravity of plane figures and solids, a system of approximating square roots, and the accomplishments in which Archimedes took most pride, those concerning a cylinder and circumscribing a sphere. Despite Archimedes’ successful design of war machinery, the Romans eventually sacked Syracuse in the Second Punic War and killed the great mathematician. On his tombstone, Archimedes asked for a symbol of a cylinder and sphere to be inscribed along with his result on the ratio of the two.
The mathematical accomplishments of Leonhard Euler were so significant and many that it is impossible to do justice to them in the space allotted here on anything more than a superficial level. However, just mentioning his achievements in this field will amply demonstrate how significant his accomplishments in mathematics were. He was the “most prolific writer of mathematics of all time” and he made “decisive and formative contributions” to geometry, calculus, and number theory (Euler 5). Euler spent more than two decades in Berlin where he wrote more than 380 article...