Archimedes is considered one of the greatest mathematicians and inventors of all time. He is famous for the Archimedes Principle, which states that when an object is immersed in a fluid, it will displace a volume of the portion of the object immersed.
Archimedes used this principle to prove that a jeweller was cheating the king. The king suspected that a solid gold crown he ordered was partly made of silver. Archimedes took two pieces of pure gold and of pure silver that had weights identical to the weight of the crown. He then successively immersed the gold, the silver and the crown in a container filled to the brim with water and measured the volume of water that overflowed with each material.
Archimedes found the the crown displaced more water than the gold, but less than the silver. This proved that the crown contained some metal other than gold or silver, and that the jeweller had stolen some of the gold given to him, and replaced it with a cheaper metal!
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