Mathematical contributions of Archimedes: Some nuggets

摘要

Archimedes is generally regarded as the greatest mathematician of antiquity and alongside Isaac Newton and C F Gauss as the top three of all times. He was also an excellent theoreticiancum-engineer who identified mathematical prob lems in his work on mechanics, got hints on their solution through engineering techniques and then solved those mathematical problems, many a time discovering fundamental results in mathematics, for instance, the concepts oflimits andintegration. In his own words,“… which I first dis covered by means of mechanics and then exhibited by means of geometry”. In this article we briefly describe some of his main contributions to mathematics.