“What we are told about Archimedes is a mix of a few hard facts and many legends,” Sherman Stein of the University of California, Davis notes in his book Archimedes: What Did He Do Besides Cry Eureka?
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I was reminded of that statement when my son Kenneth and I recently visited a bookstore and happened to hear the children’s storyteller Jim Weiss. In a highly entertaining, evocative manner, he narrated the famous tale of how Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC) used the displacement of water to uncover a scam, demonstrating that a wreath-shaped crown actually consisted of a mixture of silver and gold rather than pure gold.