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This biography examines the life and work of Archimedes, the ancient mathematician and inventor. It details his early education in Alexandria, his connection to the royal family of Syracuse, and the mechanical and mathematical contributions that defined his career before his death in 212 B.C.

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Table of Contents

Archimedes

after quoting certain Euclidean propositions about cones and cylinders, he passes to the main business of the book, the measurement of the volume and surface of a sphere and a segment of a sphere.

By circumscribing and inscribing to a great circle a regular polygon of an even number of sides and making it revolve about a diameter connecting two opposite angular points he obtains solids of revolution greater and less respectively than the sphere. In a series of propositions he finds expressions for (a) the surfaces, (b) the volumes, of the figures so inscribed and circumscribed to the sphere.

Next he proves (Prop. 32) that, if the inscribed and circumscribed polygons which, by their revolution, generate the figures are similar, the surfaces of the figures are in the duplicate ratio, and their volumes in the triplicate ratio, of their sides. Then he proves that the surfaces and volumes of the inscribed and circumscribed figures respectively are less and greater than the surface and volume respectively to which the main propositions declare the surface and volume of the sphere to be equal

(Props. 25, 27, 30, 31 Cor.). He has now all the material for applying the method of exhaustion and so proves the main propositions about the surface and volume of the sphere.

The rest of the book applies the same procedure to a segment of the sphere. Surfaces of revolution are inscribed and circumscribed to a segment less than a hemisphere, and the theorem about the surface of the segment is finally proved in Prop. 42. Prop. 43 deduces the surface of a segment greater than a hemisphere. Prop. 44 gives the volume of the sector of the sphere which includes any segment.

Book II begins with the problem of finding a sphere equal in volume to a given cone or cylinder; this requires the solution of the problem of the two mean proportionals, which is accordingly assumed. Prop. 2 deduces, by means of 1., 44, an expression for the volume of a segment of a sphere,

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