c. 287 – c. 212 BC · Greek mathematician, physicist & engineer of Syracuse
Archimedes of Syracuse was the ancient world’s most formidable mathematician — he pinned down π between useful bounds, worked out the law of the lever, and founded the study of hydrostatics, the science of bodies in fluid — though the bath story as Vitruvius tells it turns on measuring displaced volume, not on the buoyancy principle that carries his name. A substantial body of his own writing survives, including On Floating Bodies, and it is meticulous, formal, and entirely silent about crowns, baths, and running naked through Syracuse. Almost everything colourful we ‘know’ about him — the bath, the burning mirrors, the death at a Roman sword while drawing figures in the sand — reaches us from writers working centuries after his death.