Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from They Called Me Mad: Genius, Madness and the Scientists Who Pushed the Limits of Knowledge by John Monahan (on sale December 7 from Berkley) . In it Monahan takes the reader from Archimedes archetypical "Eureka!" moment to J. Robert Oppenheimer's fraught findings.
His genius shone like a beacon throughout the Hellenistic world, and his dazzling mathematical insights and wondrous inventions continue to fascinate us to this day. Unfortunately much of his actual life is obscured by the mists of time. In the absence of facts, a body of legend has grown, punctuated by secondhand and thirdhand accounts of varying accuracy. Galileo venerated him. The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious prizes for mathematicians bears his image. The tenth-century Islamic geometer Ab Sahl al-K h was so impressed by his works that he called him the “imam of mathematics” (Hirshfeld, 2009). He is credited with calculating pi and the volume of the universe, discovering principles of buoyancy, inventing water pumps, and building war engines capable of grinding the Roman army to a halt. Not to mention inventing what may have been the world’s first death ray. The name of this legendary genius, perhaps the greatest mathematician and inventor of all time, is Archimedes.
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