Archimedes

Archimedes lived in Syracuse, Sicily, around 287-212 BC, and turned geometry into a weapon of precision. He applied infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to prove theorems on areas and volumes - circle, sphere, ellipse, parabola, paraboloid, hyperboloid, spiral - and devised a system for expressing numbers too large for Greek notation. He was among the first to press mathematics into the physical world: the law of the lever, the principle of buoyancy, the concept of center of gravity. He built a screw pump, compound pulleys, war machines to defend his city, and possibly a planetarium prefiguring the Antikythera mechanism. When Roman soldiers breached Syracuse during the siege, one killed him despite orders to spare him. Cicero later found his tomb marked by a sphere and cylinder, the proof Archimedes wanted remembered. His mathematical writings stayed obscure for centuries - compiled in Byzantine Constantinople around 530 AD, translated into Arabic in the ninth century and Latin in the twelfth - until they surfaced again during the Renaissance and fed the Scientific Revolution.