Archimedean

[ahr-kuh-mee-dee-uhn, -mi-dee-uhn]

adjective

1. of, relating to, or discovered by Archimedes.

2. Mathematics.,  of or relating to any ordered field, as the field of real numbers, having the property that for any two unequal positive elements there is an integral multiple of the smaller which is greater than the larger.

Word History and Origins

Origin of Archimedean¹

First recorded in 1805–15; Archimede(s) + -an

Example Sentences

When he carves the peel of an apple into “a perfect Archimedean spiral,” finding a “sense of order and well-being” in “the ever-growing distance of the peel from the core,” you can’t help applauding.

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“Imagine the equation, or picture the graph, of the Archimedean spiral,” Serpell, a Harvard English professor, writes in the novel’s closing paragraph.

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Anthropologist Lisa Messeri, who has studied how astronomers turn data into worlds, says this imagined, distant location is an Archimedean point—that is, a point far enough away to offer a different, perhaps more objective or truer perspective.

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It’s a bit of collateral resonance, then, that by imagining viewing the Earth from an Archimedean point, astronomers move the Earth, too, if the Earth is the world from which we view the cosmos.

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Malay et al. identified the arrangement as a snub cube, which belongs to a group of polyhedra known as Archimedean solids4.

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