Mathematicians

The Story Behind the Science

Hieron, the king of Syracuse and Archimedes' friend, wanted to know whether his crown was made of solid gold. The king suspected that the gold had been mixed with silver, which is worth less than gold. So he asked Archimedes to try to resolve the question. The solution would have been easy if the king had allowed the crown to be melted down. Since that was no possible, Archimedes had to find another solution to determine the metal content of the crown. Archimedes discovered the answer while at a public bath. He noticed that when he got into the water, it overflowed the tub. By measuring the overflow, he found that the volume-the amount of space a thing occupies-of the spilled water was equal to the volume of his body under water. He realized he could determine the gold content of the crown by measuring the water it would displace against the amount of water displaced by a lump of gold weighing the same as the crown. The crown and lump of gold would each displace the same amount of water if the crown were solid gold. If the crown contained silver, it would displace more water, since the volume of a weight of silver is greater than the volume of the same weight of gold. With this discovery, Archimedes leaped from his bath and in his excitement raced naked down the street toward his home, shouting "EUREKA! I have found it!"

Archimedes was the first to develop the physical law that is now known as Archimedes' law. The law explains buoyancy, or why objects seem to lose weight in water or other liquids. This principle has been applied ever since to test precious metals.

Hippocrates. His contributions to medicine include detailed observations of disease and its effects, and an understanding of how health is often influenced by external factors.

Facts about the life of Hippocrates are rare. Some information, however, is consistent. Hippocrates was bom on the island of Cos into a family of doctors. He taught at the widely-regarded medical school on the island and traveled widely throughout ancient Greece and the Mideast giving lectures. Quite famous during his lifetime, Hippocrates died at a fairly old age in Larissa.

In his school, Hippocrates tried to separate medical knowledge from myth and superstition. Modern knowledge about Hippocrates' methods comes from the Corpus Hippocratum, a collection of 70 volumes that seems to have been gathered in the great Library of Alexandria around 200 B.C. While few of these books were probably written by Hippocrates himself, they are widely considered to be an expression of his medical teachings and philosophy.

The Hippocratic approach to medicine emphasized diet and the clinical examination of biological functions. In his lectures and teachings, Hippocrates noted that the environment can affect health in both positive and negative ways. He also advanced the idea of the "four humors," whereby disease was supposed to result from an imbalance in the body's four important fluids.

Hippocrates is credited with writing about preventive medicine. He and his followers were very concerned about preserving health through proper diet and activities, such as exercise and getting enough rest.

Hippocrates was not content to simply work on the causes and treatment of disease. He advised medical practitioners to be serious about their profession and have high moral standards. These standards are embodied in what we call the "Hippocratic Oath," which doctors still swear to today. According the Oath, a physician is required to swear to use his knowledge only to save a life, not to take it; not to cause abortion; to maintain a professional relationship with patients; and not to reveal secrets given to him by patients

Read more: Hippocrates - body http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/General-Information-and-Biographies/Hippocrates.html#ixzz0cu3koJ6a

1. He got the idea for a better machine the Analytical Engine, which would have been fully general purpose.
2. When he did not deliver a working Difference Engine as originally promised, Parliament withdrew all his funding.
3. His machinist threatened to take all the tooling and parts he had made to make up for late payments for work already done that Babbage owed him. The machinist quit.

Admittedly on his own Babbage did complete the design of the Analytical Engine and an improved Difference Engine that was much smaller and needed only about one fourth the parts, but with no way to get funding and no machinist he could not very well build them.

Or to oversimplify it, breach of contract caused by Babbage's inability to stop engineering better products and get the one he had into actual production.

"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?

This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself"

[This is from page 75 of Blaise Pascal's Pensees (New York; Penguin Books, 1966).]