Circles of Archimedes - Hardcover

The ghost of the Greek mathematician Archimedes breaks the silence of the night. He speaks of a cosmic discovery, one that sprang from the ancient symbol of the circle, and relates a mystery of his death. A lone figure of the modern era listens, conjured into a Hellenistic world of philosophy and war while, in the parallel dimension of today's world, he discovers a harsh mystery of his own. The Ancient Greek search for truth and the love of proportion come to life as Archimedes evokes the enigma of pi and the circle, and the events of his life that led to a scientific revelation, before he died at the hands of a Roman soldier in the siege of Syracuse. There he had proved that the philosopher citizen could be heir to the Greek Heroic tradition. The reader enters the Greek world of learning as it continued to flourish after the death of Alexander, when abstract knowledge was prized and the search for truth was uninhibited by religion or persecution. Archimedes enjoyed from childhood a natural communion with Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and protector of his city-state. The book leads us on a pilgrimage to Eleusis, to Thermopylae, and to Alexandria and the Egypt of the Ptolemies, in parallel with a modern dimension, set among the Stone Age sites of Avebury and Silbury Hill. Archimedes and his listener seek their own truths, which fuse in a vision of Creation at Silbury Hill, the goddess emerging as a symbol of Nature, an archetype that continually connects mankind with its origin. "The Circles of Archimedes", using a variety of voices, is remarkable for its coherence and its tension; it demonstrates that the wisdom of the ancients is central to the search for truths about ourselves and our cosmos.

Padraic Fallon was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1946, the sixth and youngest son of the poet and playwright Padraic Fallon. He is chairman of an international financial publishing company whose headquarters are in London, and is a director of one of the largest UK newspaper groups. He was awarded the Wincott Special Award for outstanding financial journalism in 1981. He is married, with four children and a granddaughter, and lives in Wiltshire and London. He wrote a dramatised memoir of his childhood, A Hymn of the Dawn, which was published by Lilliput Press, Dublin in 2003. The Circles of Archimedes is his first novel.