Archimedes

c. 287–212 BCE

Archimedes of Syracuse was the greatest mathematician of antiquity. He found the area of the circle and the parabola, the surface and volume of the sphere, the law of the lever and of floating bodies, and a way of naming numbers large enough to count the sand of the universe; in the Method he showed how he discovered his theorems by weighing figures against one another. He was killed when the Romans took Syracuse in 212 BCE.