Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives

of some of history's most intriguing and significant figures, from ancient Egyptian pharaohs and

medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies.

Today we know Archimedes best as a mathematician.

But if he was known for anything in his own time, it was for his war machines.

Not least a great claw that could pluck ships straight from the ocean.

In this Life of the Week episode,

Professor Michael Scott talks us through the ancient Greek polymaths myriad creations and why his work is still relevant today. He was speaking to Kev Lachin. Michael, thank you so much for joining me.

We're talking about Archimedes today and and I suppose my first question should be, for those who don't know who he is,

who is Archimedes? Well, I suspect if people have heard anything to do with Archimedes,

they're imagining a naked figure running down the street, soaking wet, having got out of his

bath. That seems to be the image that most

people have in their heads of Archimedes. But before we get to that moment, and imagine,

kind of a slightly unpleasant image, probably, in some ways, let's dial back and think,

where are we? We're in Sicily, in the city of Syracuse. When are we? The very end, really, of the third

century BC. And this is a time when Rome is not yet the superpower empire it will become. Its

influences expanding, expanding, expanding and has just really kind of eaten up Sicily for the first

time. And Archimedes is a man

living in the town of Syracuse in Sicily. And he's doing a lot of work for the local king of

Sicily, solving all sorts of problems. And so really Archimedes, I like to think of him as a bit

of a polymath problem solver. He was doing a little bit of this,

a little bit of that, helping with a buoyancy problem, a weighing problem, a geometry problem,

...