the Week of Proper 26 / Ordinary 31
Click here to join the effort!
Bible Encyclopedias
Archimedes
The 1901 Jewish Encyclopedia
or The greatest mathematician of antiquity; born in Syracuse about 287 B.C. His influence on Jewish literature was not extensive. Only two of his works have come down to us in a Hebrew translation. Kalonymusben Kalonymus (after 1306) twice turned the treatise "On Conoids and Spheroids" into Hebrew, under the title 
. He is said to have made use of an Arabic translation of Costa ben Luca, though Arabic bibliographers know nothing of such a translation. An unknown author—whom Steinschneider surmises to have been the same Kalonymus—translated κύκλου μάθησις under the title 
, from the Arabic of Thabit ibn Kurrah (the Hebrew title is to be corrected to 
, which means "extension," and corresponds exactly to the Arabic "MasaḦah").
Abraham bar Ḥiyyah shows a perfect knowledge of the theories of Archimedes in his "Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences" (compare Steinschneider, "Hebr. Bibl." 7:92); and the same is true of Abraham ibn Ezra, in his astronomical work "Reshit Ḥokmah."
- Steinschneider, Hebr. Uebers. § 310;
- Z. D. M. G. 172 et seq.
These files are public domain.
Singer, Isidore, Ph.D, Projector and Managing Editor. Entry for 'Archimedes'. 1901 The Jewish Encyclopedia. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/tje/a/archimedes.html. 1901.
