
*Includes pictures *Profiles the inventions and works of both men. *Includes a bibliography on each man for further reading. "Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.'"- Archimedes "Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind." - Leonardo Over 1500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci became the Renaissance Man, antiquity had its own in the form of Archimedes, one of the most famous Ancient Greeks. An engineer, mathematician, physicist, scientist and astronomer all rolled into one, Archimedes has been credited for making groundbreaking discoveries, some of which are undoubtedly fact and others that are almost certainly myth. Regardless, he's considered the first man to determine a way to measure an object's mass, and also the first man to realize that refracting the Sun's light could burn something, theorizing the existence of lasers over two millennia before they existed. People still use the design of the Archimedes screw in water pumps today, and modern scholars have tried to link him to the recently discovered Antikythera mechanism, an ancient "computer" of sorts that used mechanics to accurately chart astronomical data depending on the date it was set to. It has long been difficult to separate fact from legend in the story of Archimedes' life, from his death to his legendary discovery of how to differentiate gold from fool's gold, but many of his works survived antiquity, and many others were quoted by other ancient writers. As a result, even while his life and death remain topics of debate, his writings and measurements are factually established and well known, and they range on everything from measuring an object's density to measuring circles and parabolas. The Renaissance spawned the use of the label "Renaissance Man" to describe a person who is extremely talented in multiple fields, and no discussion of the Renaissance is
Page Count:
152
Publication Date:
2017-10-17
Publisher:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10:
1978289049
ISBN-13:
9781978289048
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