Greek Mathematics

Greek mathematics was developed around the shores of Eastern Mediterranean from around
7th century BC to 4th century AD, mostly around the 6th century BC.
The Greeks adopted elements of mathematics from Babylonians and Egyptians, who were
essentially empirical in nature. Greek mathematics is divided into two periods classical and
Hellenistic. The Greek mathematics after the reign of Alexander the great is known as
Hellenistic mathematics.
The term mathematics came into being from a Greek term mathema which means subject
of instruction. Even the term geometry is derived from the greek roots geo meaning
earth and metrein meaning measure.
Because people in ancient Greece had very gawky ways of writing down numbers, they didn't
like algebra. They found it extremely difficult to write down equalities or number problems.
Instead, they were mainly focused on geometry, and used geometric means to solve problems
that other mathematicians practice algebra for. Greek mathematicians were also into proving
that certain ideas or postulates were true. They generalised theories and proofs which were
absent in the previous civilizations which made a huge contribution to the world of
mathematics (geometry, engineering, etc). They were generally very interested in rationality,
in things making sense and hanging together.
The ancient Greek numeral system, known as Attic or Herodianic numerals developed by
about 450 BCE, came into use as early as the 7th Century BCE. It was a base 10 system with
symbols for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 repeated as needed. Addition was done by
totalling separately the symbols (1s, 10s, 100s, etc) in the numbers to be added, and
multiplication was a tedious process of consecutive repetitions. Division was just the inverse
of the whole multiplication system.
It is believed that the greeks were the first ones to come up with the idea of infinity, as is
relevant from the known paradoxes of the philosophers Zeno of Elea in the 5th Century BCE,
which includes the paradox called Achilles and the Tortoise, which is basically a race
between the both of them. Achilles being fast, gives a head start to the tortoise but by the
while Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has already stimulated
forward. By the time Achilles touches that point, the tortoise has stimulated yet again, etc., so
that in significance the fast Achilles can never catch up with the slow tortoise. Another one of
Zenos paradox includes the Dichotomy Paradox, which is grounded on the infinite
divisibility of space and time, and the rest on the idea that a half plus a quarter plus an
eighth plus a sixteenth, etc, etc, to infinity will never quite equal a whole.
The paradox stems, though, from the incorrect postulation that it is impossible to complete
an infinite number of distinct dashes in a finite time, although it is exceptionally difficult to
prove the fallacy.

The first most prominent Greek mathematician in the classical period was Thales, according
to the historians. He reckoned the use of shadows to measure the height of the Egyptian
pyramids in the early 600s BC. He is also attributed to giving several fundamental results
containing circles and angles of triangles. Thales entrenched what has now come to being as
Thales theorem, whereby if a triangle is situated inside a circle with the long side as a
diameter of the circle, then the opposite angle will always be a right angle. He

established another theorem called the intercept theorem which gives data about the
proportions of line segments that are created if two crossing lines are interrupted by a pair of
parallels. .
Thales is believed to be the earliest known man in antiquity to whom explicit mathematical
sightings have been credited.
The next key mathematician in Greece is a well-known man Pythagoras, of the area Samos.
He instituted an academic society known as the Pythagorean brotherhood which was
established for the learning of philosophy, mathematics and science and detained awareness
in common, so all of the sightings by individual mathematicians in the brotherhood were
credited to the society. Also in the ancient times it was habitual to give all credit to the master,
hence Pythagoras was given acknowledgement for the findings made by his society. He
alleged in the distinct role of the counting numbers or whole number as the basis for the
natural occurrences. He is credited with the contribution of two very important results in
mathematics: The Pythagoras theorem which states that the sum of the squares of the base
and perpendicular in a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse, and the
irrational quantities.
Pythagoras is believed to be a very moral man who also has been believed in devising the
words philosophy ( ie love of wisdom) and mathematics (the one which is learned).

The Pythagorean brotherhood produced very qualified mathematicians, one of whom is

Hippasus, whose discovery recognized the power of geometry over algebra/arithmetic in all
coming years of greek mathematics. He sighted that the side of a square of length 1 unit has a
diagonal of irrational measure. Born in 440 BC in Chios, he is attributed with two important
donations to geometry. The first is his arrangement of the primary elements : the first
explanation evolving his theorems of geometry, rationally and accurately from a few axioms.
The other was the quadrature of the line.
This marks the end of the classical period and the starting of the Hellenistic period, with
Alexander the great defeating the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, Central Asia including
parts of India, which led to the distribution of Greek in these areas. Greek came to be the
language of academicians and scholars throughout the Hellenistic period, which merged the
Greek mathematics with Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics to give rise to a Hellenistic
mathematics.
Perhaps the most paramount mathematician of the ancient times and in the Hellenistic period
was Archimedes of Sicily. He made prodigious benefactions in applied mechanics, astronomy
and hydrostatics. Apart from that, he developed means for calculating areas of curved plane
figures, volumes enclosed by curved surfaces and techniques of approximating the value of .

is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity

The greatest mathematician of antiquity is Archimedes (287212 B.C.) of Syracuse, Sicily.

He made great contributions in applied mechanics, astronomy and hydrostatics. He devised

methods for computing areas of curvilinear plane figures, volumes bounded by curved
surfaces and methods of approximating . Using the method of exhaustion (of Eudoxes), he
anticipated the integral calculus of Newton and Leibniz by more than 2000 years; in one of
his problems he also anticipated their invention of differential calculus
TWO PERIODS CLASSICAL AND HELLENISTIC
TILL PYTHAGORAS, IT WAS CLASSICAL, AFTER THAT HELLENICTIC.
The first famous Greek mathematician was Thales (who was actually from a Greek city in
West Asia). In the 600s BC, Thales figured out how to use shadows to calculate the height of
the Egyptian pyramids. About a hundred years later, Pythagoras proved that the Pythagorean
Theorem was always true. Then in the 300s BC, Euclid (who was born in Egypt, in Africa,
but spoke Greek) wrote a famous geometry book proving many more mathematical ideas
about the area of a circle, the volume of spheres, and much more. Archimedes probably knew
Euclid; he lived in a Greek city in Sicily. Archimedes worked on getting a more accurate
number for pi, and a proof for calculating the circumference of a circle. (So all of these men
spoke Greek, but none of them actually lived in Greece.) Probably both Euclid and
Archimedes knew something about the work Indian mathematicians were doing at the same
time with infinity and combinations. Possibly Indian mathematicians also knew about Euclid
and Archimedes' work.

Plato (427347 B.C.) studied philosophy in Athens under Socrates. Aristotle, a pupil of Plato,
was primarily a philosopher. His contribution to mathematics is his analysis of the roles of
definitions and hypotheses in mathematics.