Orrery and Claw: Archimedes
Greg Woolf, 18 November 2010
Archimedes, the most famous mathematician of classical antiquity, was killed in 212 BC, as a small piece of collateral damage in the Roman sack of the Greek city of Syracuse. Syracuse itself was a rather larger piece of collateral damage, having picked the wrong side in Rome’s second war with Carthage. It was not a good year for the ancient Greek cities of the western Mediterranean....