If the ordinar y person were asked to say off-hand what he knew of Archimedes, he would probably, at the most, be able to quote one or other of the well-known stories about him: how, after discovering the solution of some problem in the bath, he was so overjoyed that he ran naked to his house, shouting εὕρηκα, εὕρηκα (or, as we might say, I've got it, I've got it); or how he said Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth; or again how he was killed, at the capture of Syracuse in the Second Punic War, by a Roman soldier who resented being told to get away from a diagram drawn on the ground which he was studying.