From Syracuse
Eureka! Or, "I have found it." And that's pretty much all I'd ever heard about Archimedes. Archimedes was born in Syracuse. Sicily, that is. But, as Syracuse, NY, was named for Syracuse, Italy in 1825 when the Village of Syracuse was officially incorporated, we can claim a little shared heritage. The founders of our city saw what they thought were some common features, such as the salt industry and a nearby town called "Salina." Exploring an article on the Antikythera recently, I read that Archimedes was cited as having been a possible creator of the ancient "computing" device, given his amazing array of discoveries in math, engineering, and physics. The Antikythera is a startling device that uses gears, equations, dials and pins to provide, as the article puts it, "a dizzying display of astronomical information." ("Will We Ever Unlock Its Secrets?" by Darren Orf, Popular Mechanics, March-April 2025). No one is certain how t...
