Wednesday, January 11, 2006

My research about a mathematician

I like to research on olden mathematicians. This is about a famous one:Archemedes. It is about how he helped the king find out a cheater who mixed silver with the gold to cheat the king.
Archimedes made two masses of the same weight as thecrown, one of gold and the other of silver.
He filled a large vessel with water to the very brim,and dropped the mass of silver into it.
The amount of water that overflowed was equal in volume to that of the silver mass sunk in the vessel.
Archimedes refilled the vessel and dropped the mass of gold into the full vessel.
Not as much water overflowed because gold is more dense than silver, so the same weight takes up less volume.
Finally, Archimedes filled the vessel again and dropped the crown itself into the water.
He found that more water overflowed for the crown than for the mass of gold of the same weight.Hence, reasoning from the fact that more water was lost in the case of the crown than in that of the gold mass, he detected the mixing of silver with the gold.

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