Archimedes Few certain details remain about the life of antiquit's greatest mathematician, Archimedes. We know he was born in 287 B.C. around Syracuse from a report about 1400 years after the fact. Archimedes tells about his father, Pheidias, in his book The Sandreckoner. Pheidias was an astronomer, who was famous for being the author of a treatise on the diameters of the sun and the moon. Historians speculate that Pheidias' profession explains why Archimedes chose his career. Some scholars have characterized Archimedes as an aristocrat who actively participated in the Syracusan court and may have been rela