Archimedes: The Great Pioneering Streaker! Poem by RAJ NANDY

ARCHIMEDES: THE GREAT PIONEERING
STREAKER!


There lived in the third century BC, in the Sicilian
town of Syracuse,
A Greek mathematician called Archimedes.
He was tasked by King Hiero in his town,
To find the purity of gold in the crown;
Suspicious of the goldsmith having mixed
in it,
Some impure material of inferior kind,
Which he wanted Archimedes to find!

Archimedes lost in thought, one day,
Entered the public bath on his way!
And as his body began to get submerged,
He happened to notice by chance,
Water spilling over from the tub!
The answer suddenly flashed across his
mind,
And he jumped up leaving everything
behind,
Wearing only his birthday suit!
Running through the street of Syracuse,
Exclaiming, ' Eureka! Eureka! ',
(I have found it! I have found it!)
Perhaps to become the first streaker of
history!
While establishing the Principles of
Buoyancy!

Archimedes, son of Pheidias the astronomer,
Studied at the great Alexandrian city,
Remembered even this day for his pioneering
works,
In Hydrostatics, Mechanics and Geometry!
With his ingenious mechanical discoveries,
Held the great Roman galleys of Marcellus
at bay,
For more than three years, as Plutarch says!
Later one day, while lost in deep thought,
Trying to resolve a problem of geometry,
Refused to hear Marcellus' bidding!
To be slain by the Roman soldier, who had
come to fetch him!
O those Romans, with lesser brains and more
brawns!

And some hundred and thirty years after his
death, in 75 BC,
Cicero, the Governor of Sicily,
Found the tomb of great Archimedes, near
the Agrigentine gate,
Over grown with bushes and thorns,
Lying buried in the scented dust of History!

-Raj Nandy
New Delhi
29 Mar 08