Students' Contributions: Archimedes and the Golden Crown (by 9B Tina Lin)

This is the 2nd entry in the "Students' Contributions" series.  You can read about interesting, unedited history/facts/problems of mathematics written by fellow students!  The writers may also share their thoughts on their topics! Please try to leave some comments (you don't need to log-in to leave a comment now!) to show some love!                         ----------Mr. Ip

 

Archimedes was a person like Leonardo Da Vinci, who was an expert in many different areas. He was a Greek mathematician, engineer, physicist, astronomer, and also an inventor. A biography about him had been written by his friend before, but it was lost. As a result, many details of his life are still unknown till today. Although the details of his life aren’t known by people today, almost everyone knows about his contributions to the “human knowledge”. The major subjects that Archimedes was famous for were mathematics and mechanical. He put a lot of effort into it, and came out with a lot of theories that no one ever thought of. In addition, he was sent to Alexandria by his father for his studies. After he went back to his birthplace again, the king kept him in his palace and sponsored him for his researches. Archimedes lived in this condition about ten years which helped him a lot with his discovery in different areas.

One of the famous stories about Archimedes was the “Golden Crown”. One day, King Hiero asked for a golden crown to be made for him. However, when the crown was finished, the king suspected if the person that made the crown had added any dishonest goldsmith into it. The king asked Archimedes to give him an answer according to his question without destroying the crown. 

This request gave Archimedes a really hard time. If he couldn’t cause any damage to the crown, it also meant that he wasn’t allowed to break the crown down and turn it into a regular shape, which was the simplest way for him to calculate. He was thinking about this question every moment in his daily life. Finally, one day while he was taking a bath, he found the answer of it. There was some water in his bathtub. When he put himself into it, the water came out of the bathtub. He then realized that the volume of the water that came out of the bathtub was equal to the volume of him. This was how Archimedes first came up with the idea on how to solve the king’s question.

However, his final accurate answer came out along with his theory of buoyancy. He compared the different volume of water that came out when he put the crown and the same amount of gold that the crown should have. Last he successfully proved that the person who made the crown was dishonest.

 

Archimedes almost gave his entire life to his country, because he not only discovered many theory in various areas that no one ever thought of, but he also came out with a lot of military inventions to help his country with the war. I really admire his knowledge. Unfortunately, he died because of the war, or I believe that he could have found out more unbelievable discoveries. Even before his death, his last words were still talking about circle. I guess that’s something I can never do in my entire life-putting so much effort on things just to look for an answer that he wanted.


Sources of the pictures:
http://celebrity.50g.com/htmlpage/photo.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes
http://sweetcandybubble.blogspot.com/2009/07/blog-post.html
http://www.wretch.cc/album/Lionchain