Claw of Archimedes Claw of Archimedes The Claw (, "harpágē", "snatcher") of Archimedes (also known as the "iron hand") was an ancient weapon devised by Archimedes to defend the seaward portion of Syracuse's city wall against amphibious assault. Although its exact nature is unclear, the accounts of ancient historians seem to describe it as a sort of crane equipped with a grappling hook that was able to lift an attacking ship partly out of the water, then either cause the ship to capsize or suddenly drop it. These machines featured prominently during the Second Punic War in 214 BC, when the Roman Republic
Archimedes Palimpsest of the Walters Art Museum exhibit "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes". In 2015, in an experiment into the preservation of digital data, Swiss scientists encoded text from the Archimedes Palimpsest into DNA. Thanks to its deciphering, some mathematicians suggest, it is possible that Archimedes may have invented integration. It contains: The most remarkable of the above works is "The Method", of which the palimpsest contains the only known copy. In his other works, Archimedes often proves the equality of two areas or volumes with Eudoxus' method of exhaustion, an ancient Greek counterpart of the modern method of limits.