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The story of the golden crown does not appear anywhere in Archimedes' known works. The practicality of the method described has been called into question due to the extreme accuracy that would be required to measure water displacement. [35]
Archimedes' insight led to the solution of a problem posed by Hiero of Syracuse, on how to assess the purity of an irregular golden votive crown; he had given his goldsmith the pure gold to be used, and correctly suspected he had been cheated by the goldsmith removing gold and adding the same weight of silver.
In the story, Archimedes was asked (c. 250 BC) by the local king to determine whether a crown was pure gold. During a subsequent trip to a public bath, Archimedes noted that water was displaced when his body sank into the bath, and particularly that the volume of water displaced equaled the volume of his body immersed in the water.
Vitruvius related the famous story about Archimedes and his detection of adulterated gold in a royal crown. When Archimedes realized the volume of the crown could be measured exactly by the displacement created in a bath of water, he ran into the street with the cry of "Eureka!", and the discovery enabled him to compare the density of the crown ...
Archimedes may have used his principle of buoyancy to determine whether the golden crown was less dense than solid gold.. The "Eureka" legend told of Archimedes (287–212 BC), where the philosopher proved that a crown was not solid gold by comparing measurements of its displacement of water and its weight, is a direct forerunner of modern forensic engineering techniques. [2]
After Archimedes, Hellenistic mathematics began to decline. There were a few minor stars yet to come, but the golden age of geometry was over. Proclus (410–485), author of Commentary on the First Book of Euclid, was one of the last important players in Hellenistic geometry. He was a competent geometer, but more importantly, he was a superb ...
Archimedes then proceeds to locate the centre of gravity of the parallelogram and the triangle, ending book one with a proof on the centre of gravity of the trapezium. On the Equilibrium of Planes II shares the same subject matter as the first book but was most likely written at a later date. It contains ten propositions regarding the centre of ...
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, originally a Byzantine Greek copy of a compilation of Archimedes and other authors. It contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost (the Ostomachion and the Method of Mechanical Theorems ) and the only surviving original Greek edition of his work On Floating ...