section_path: Legacy/Mathematics and physics
section_name: Mathematics and physics
paragraph_text: Mathematics and physics
  
  Historians of science and mathematics almost universally agree that Archimedes was the finest mathematician from antiquity. Eric Temple Bell, for instance, wrote:
  
  Any list of the three “greatest” mathematicians of all history would include the name of Archimedes. The other two usually associated with him are Newton and Gauss. Some, considering the relative wealth—or poverty—of mathematics and physical science in the respective ages in which these giants lived, and estimating their achievements against the background of their times, would put Archimedes first.
  
  Likewise, Alfred North Whitehead and George F. Simmons said of Archimedes:
  
  ... in the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the year 212 BC...
  
  If we consider what all other men accomplished in mathematics and physics, on every continent and in every civilization, from the beginning of time down to the seventeenth century in Western Europe, the achievements of Archimedes outweighs it all. He was a great civilization all by himself.
  
  Reviel Netz, Suppes Professor in Greek Mathematics and Astronomy at Stanford University and an expert in Archimedes notes:
  
  And so, since Archimedes led more than anyone else to the formation of the calculus and since he was the pioneer of the application of mathematics to the physical world, it turns out that Western science is but a series of footnotes to Archimedes. Thus, it turns out that Archimedes is the most important scientist who ever lived.
  
  Leonardo da Vinci repeatedly expressed admiration for Archimedes, and attributed his invention Architonnerre to Archimedes. Galileo called him "superhuman" and "my master", while Huygens said, "I think Archimedes is comparable to no one", consciously emulating him in his early work. Leibniz said, "He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times". Gauss's heroes were Archimedes and Newton, and Moritz Cantor, who studied under Gauss in the University of Göttingen, reported that he once remarked in conversation that "there had been only three epoch-making mathematicians: Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein ".
  
  The inventor Nikola Tesla praised him, saying:
  
  Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.