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Which books did Archimedes write about spheres and cylinders?
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Archimedes
Archimedes, oil on canvas by Giuseppe Nogari, 18th century; in the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, Moscow. Archimedes was an ancient Greek mathematician and inventor.
Archimedes wrote the treatise titled On the Sphere and Cylinder, which consists of two books.12
In this work, he established significant mathematical proofs regarding the properties of these shapes, most notably demonstrating that:
- The surface area of a sphere with radius r is four times the area of its greatest circle ().12
- The volume of a sphere is two-thirds the volume of the cylinder in which it is inscribed ().12
Archimedes held these discoveries in such high regard that he requested a diagram of a sphere inscribed within a cylinder be engraved upon his tomb.12