The Greek mathematician and engineer of Syracuse, among the greatest of antiquity, who measured the circle by trapping it between polygons, found the area and volume of curved figures by a method of exhaustion that anticipated the integral calculus, founded the sciences of statics and hydrostatics with the law of the lever and the principle of buoyancy, devised the water-raising screw and compound pulley, and was killed by a Roman soldier during the sack of Syracuse in 212 BC.
He reasoned his way to the edge of the calculus nearly two thousand years before Newton. Working in the Greek city of Syracuse, Archimedes measured the circle by squeezing it between many-sided polygons, weighed curved shapes against straight ones in his imagination, and proved that a sphere is exactly two-thirds of the cylinder that holds it. He said that with a firm place to stand he could move the earth, and his machines dramatized the law of the lever. Then in 212 BC a Roman soldier killed him in the sack of his city, and the ancient world lost one of its most powerful mathematical minds.