Archimedes Quotes
More Archimedes Quotes
Archimedes had stated, that given the force, any given weight might be moved; and even boasted that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this.
Plutarch— Life of Marcellus.
There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians: Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
ferdinand eisenstein— Carl Friedrich Gauss, as quoted in Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science (1951) by Eric Temple Bell
Bradman 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. hardy— Quoted by C. P. Snow in his introduction to reprints of the book.
O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!
mikhail lermontov— A Hero of Our Time (1839)
About 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 russo— 1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 6
And 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!"
Plutarch— Pleasure not attainable according to Epicurus, 11.
Philosophy 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.
vitruvius— Chapter I, Sec. 7
Too often we forget that [[genius], too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions. We also forget that genius is not genius all the time, although it is superior all the time.
— p. 169 (The Art of Thinking (1928))
Histories 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 .
— Lucio Russo, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution" in The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)
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 Cajori— A History of Mathematics, "The Greeks" (p. 42)
O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!
mikhail lermontov— Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1839).
Archimedes had stated, that given the force, any given weight might be moved; and even boasted that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this.
— Life of Marcellus.
And 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!"
— Pleasure not attainable according to Epicurus, 11.
Archimedes 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.
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (London 1941).Quotations by Hardy. Gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk. Retrieved on 27 November 2013.
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— "The Cleric of Treason"
