"GIVE ME a place to stand, and I will move the world." So said Archimedes to King Hiero of Syracuse in the second century B.C.

King Hiero laughed, and challenged Archimedes to move an enormous ship from its ways, singlehanded.

Archimedes was more than equal to the task. With a system of pulleys he moved the ship—and went on to formulate the law of the lever.

Again, in proving that the king had been cheated by his goldsmith, Archimedes evolved something more important—the principles of relative density and buoyancy.

With such inventions as the compound pulley and the Archimedean screw he provided the foundation for the sciences of mechanics and hydrostatics. And his original work as a geometrician gave modern geometry many of its basic tools.

In a biography full of lively incident, Jeanne Bendick introduces Archimedes, mathematician, inventor, and great pioneer of modern scientific method—one of the immortals of science.

From the book