As is the case with all persons from ancient times, we know little about their lives directly, but have to extrapolate from whatever clues we can find, so the writer of the biography or an historical novel about a famous person from the distant past has to be somewhat of a detective. One of the few clues to the personality of Archimedes is a practice attributed to him by Plutarch, whose description of Archimedes as part of the life of Marcellus is the most extensive account of his life from ancient times: Plutarch says “”he used to trace geometrical figures in the ashes of the fires and diagrams in the oil on his body” and that he forgot to bathe because he was preoccupied thinking about mathematics.
When I was writing Before Eureka! The Adventures of Young Archimedes, I followed Plutarch and brought this behavior into his boyhood, making it the basis of other boys derisively calling Archimedes by the nickname “Figures.” Plutarch’s Archimedes appeared to interact with his own thoughts better than with what society expected of him.
Although I did not start out with this idea—indeed, I didn’t even recognize it until the novel was written—my young Archimedes would today be diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome, one of the lower rungs of the autistic spectrum. I finally understood this when a friend who has Asperger’s and has written two books about it spoke at a meeting I attended. My friend’s experiences described in the talk all seemed like the kind of difficulties with personality that my version of young Archimedes had. Furthermore, the obsession with a particular topic and great skill in dealing with that topic is typical of the autistic spectrum. Archimedes total focus on mathematics, as described by Plutarch, fits that autistic pattern as well.