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Author: Nicastro, Nicholas

Ancient Greece

Published on 16 September 2024 by REAKTION BOOKS in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the Great Lives of the Ancient World’ series.

Hardback | 240 pages, 35 illustrations
147 x 223 x 24 | 372g

Galileo, Leonardo, Newton, Tesla – all revered him. As an engineer, Archimedes of Syracuse almost single-handedly held off the world’s most powerful army. In an era of abacuses and sundials, he designed geared calculating devices that accurately modeled the solar system. As a mathematician, he knew more in 212 BCE than all of Europe for the next seventeen centuries. In this bold reimagining, modern polymath Nicholas Nicastro shines new light on Archimedes’ life and work. Far from the aloof, physically inept figure of historical myth, he is revealed to be an ambitious, combative and fiercely competitive man. A genius who challenged an empire, Archimedes emerges as the world’s first fully modern scientist – millennia before his intellectual descendants transformed our world.