Archimedes
Regular price
€19.99
Galileo, Leonardo, Newton, Tesla – all revered him. As an engineer, Archimedes of Syracuse almost single-handedly held off the world’s most powerful army. In an era of abacuses and sundials, he designed geared calculating devices that accurately modeled the solar system. As a mathematician, he knew more in 212 BCE than all of Europe for the next seventeen centuries. In this bold reimagining, modern polymath Nicholas Nicastro shines new light on Archimedes’ life and work. Far from the aloof, physically inept figure of historical myth, he is revealed to be an ambitious, combative and fiercely competitive man. A genius who challenged an empire, Archimedes emerges as the world’s first fully modern scientist – millennia before his intellectual descendants transformed our world.
Nicholas Nicastro has taught history, anthropology and psychology at Cornell University and Hobart-William Smith Colleges. His books include Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe (2008), and he has written for the New York Times, the New York Observer and Archaeology.