There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians: Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
ferdinand eisensteinBradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine. They had better be moved from now on into the Bradman class.
g. h. hardyO vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!
mikhail lermontovAbout Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings.
lucio russoAnd Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a manner of computing the proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing over the bathing-stool. He leaped up as one possessed or inspired, crying, "I have found it! Eureka!"
PlutarchPhilosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous... So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers.
vitruviusHistories of scientific thought tend to obscure the revolutionary state of knowledge in the age of Archimedes the Hellenistic period toning down the differences between it, the natural philosophy of classical Greece two centuries earlier, and even the prescientific knowledge of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia .
Archimedes studied also the ellipse and accomplished its quadrature, but to the hyperbola he seems to have paid less attention. It is believed that he wrote a book on conic sections.
Florian CajoriO vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!
mikhail lermontovArchimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
The absolute scholar is in fact a rather uncanny being. He is instinct with Nietzsche's finding that to be interested in something, to be totally interested in it, is a libidinal thrust more powerful than love or hatred, more tenacious than faith or friendship — not infrequently, indeed, more compelling than personal life itself. Archimedes does not flee from his killers, he does not even turn his head to acknowledge their rush into his garden when he is immersed in the algebra of conic sections.
George Steiner