Archimedes: A Greek Mathematician

He was a Greek mathematician born in 287 B.C in Syracuse. Archimedes is considered as the greatest mathematician of all time. During his youth, he studied in Alexandria, Egypt. I’m going to write about one of his many mathematic discoveries.

He found the approximate value of pi using the method of exhaustion:

First he draws a circle and the draws two polygons, one on the inside and the other on the outsides as you can see in the drawings above. And then he increases the number of sides by 1. When there are 96 sides in each polygon, he calculates the lengths of the sides and found that the polygon outside the circle has a length of3₁/⁷(approximately 3.1429) and the other circle has a length of 3₁₀/⁷(approximately 3.1408) and concluded that the value pi is between these two values. And it was true!

Finally, he died in 212 B.C supposedly killed by a roman soldier.