Ancient Greece produced its fair share of brilliant minds—Pythagoras the mathematician/philosopher, Euclid the mathematician/philosopher, Plato the mathematician/philosopher, Leonidas the warrior/THIS-IS-SPARTA-er—but even among this exemplary company, Archimedes of Syracuse stands out. Archimedes was your typical peerless genius polymath, adept in pretty much any field that uses numbers (the usual suspects: math, physics, astronomy, engineering, siege warfare).

While Archimedes' work in geometry and buoyancy may be his most profound and unique insights, ole Archie was also a key contributor to the field of rotational motion in the form of his "Law of the Lever," first published around 250 B.C. in the riveting bestseller On the Equilibrium of Planes¹. In this sweeping, tragic Bildungsroman of love and loss and how to calculate the center of gravity of various geometrical shapes, Archimedes offered an explanation for the lever, one of mankind's simple machines.

Archimedes wasn't the first person to invent the lever, but he was the first to successfully describe why it works—why a crowbar can open a jammed door, why a wheelbarrow can help you lift heavy loads, why a tottering teeter-totter teeters. It all comes down to a concept called torque: the bigger a force or, more importantly for levers, the further a force is applied from the lever's pivot point, the more that force wants to rotate the lever. A small force applied at the end of a long lever can create enough torque to move heavy loads on the other end of the lever, something called "mechanical advantage" by current engineers and physicists—but "the Law of the Lever" by ancient Greeks. In the words of Archimedes himself, "eureka."

Being the one person in the ancient world to come up with this explanation did not make Archimedes a particularly humble man (although that could have been the death ray he invented, or maybe the giant arcade claw game he used to defend Syracuse from the Romans). "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it," Archimedes reportedly said, "and I shall move the world."