Eureka Man

Eureka Man

“Eureka!” That famous joyous expletive for an “ah-ha” moment—from the ancient Greek phrase for “I have found it”—was as the legend goes uttered by Archimedes as he ran naked and dripping through the streets of ancient Syracuse, having just leaped out of his bathtub with a sudden insight into a method by which he could determine the purity of a gold crown by measuring the amount of water it displaced. This famous story has long made Archimedes the archetypal eccentric scientist, but in Eureka Man, professor Alan Hirshfeld shows that Archimedes was no mere eccentric and deserves a place among the pantheon of history’s greatest thinkers.

Archimedes (287 BC – 212 BC) was born in the independent city-state of Syracuse, and though virtually nothing is known about his formative years, his reputation swelled to mythic proportions during his lifetime due to his many remarkable feats of engineering. A particular triumph was the hand-cranked irrigation device known as the Archimedes Screw; he also developed various war machines for the famous defense of Syracuse against Roman invaders in 213 BC, including a variety of catapults and the “Archimedes Claw,” a crane of sorts that grabbed hold of enemy ships and dashed them against the rocks.

More that just a clever inventor though, Archimedes developed the concepts of simple machines—pulleys, levers and the like—that would become fundamental to the technology of the coming millennia. Understanding of the power of these simple devices, he is said to have made the famous boast, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” In a more realistic demonstration of their potential, he used them to single-handedly launch a fully laden ship. And after his bathtub breakthrough, he established the key principles of buoyancy that govern the flotation of everything from boats to balloons.

But according to Plutarch, Archimedes' first love was mathematics, and there he made enormous contributions as well, working with square roots, calculating the value of pi and extending many of the concepts of Euclid. Hirshfeld explores Archimedes’ work in detail, using equations and diagrams to bring us face to face with the great man’s thinking.

In the second part of Eureka Man, Hirshfeld tells the history of the West’s rediscovery of Archimedes in the Middle Ages, and he chronicles the remarkable saga of the famous Archimedes Palimpsest, a long-lost manuscript rediscovered in the 20th century that reveals much about how Archimedes’ achievements were recorded and then passed down over two millennia.

Concise and technical yet breezy, Eureka Man is a pleasure to read. It is an entertaining look beyond the legend and into the substance of one of history’s true geniuses.

Hardcover: 288 pages

Publisher: Walker & Company ( September 01, 2009 )

Item #: 33-9642

ISBN: 9780802716187

Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 13.0 ounces