MAXZONE ACADEMY

  Archimedes (ca. 287–212 BCE) was a relative of the ruler of Syracuse, Hieron II, and his father was the astronomer Phidias. Belonging to one of Syracuse’s most aristocratic families, Archimedes didn’t have to work, and mathematics became his passion. In fact, he is believed to have cared so little about daily life that he left meals uneaten when a mathematical problem occupied his mind. Archimedes is famous for a great discovery he made while taking a bath. The episode with the bath actually begins with a request by Hieron to his bright relative to help him determine whether a goldsmith had stolen some of his gold. The king had apparently asked the goldsmith to make him a new crown, providing him with the needed gold. When the king got his new crown from the goldsmith, he became suspicious that the goldsmith had replaced some of the gold inside the crown with silver or another cheaper metal and then pocketed the missing gold. The king needed Archimedes to find a way to compare ...

Eudoxus was born in 408 BCE to an impoverished family in Knidus, Asia Minor. Because of his family’s low socioeconomic status, he would have had no chance at a successful life if it weren’t for his powerful mathematical skills. As a young adult, Eudoxus heard about Plato’s Academy and borrowed money to travel there. Many of the philosophers at the Academy ignored the young man, but Plato recognized his genius and supported him in his mathematical pursuits. There was no remuneration for membership in the esteemed Academy, and Eudoxus had so little money that he could not afford to live with the other members in Athens. He was forced to rent a small room in the nearby city of Piraeus, where rents were low and basic food could be obtained inexpensively. He commuted daily to Athens to attend the discussions at the Academy. Eventually, after having proved several major theorems in geometry that no one had been able to tackle, Eudoxus earned the respect of the other philosophers. Thanks in p...

  The Greek philosopher Plato (428–348 BCE) was born just a year after the infamous plague. He was not a mathematician, but he believed that mathematics was the study of truth. To emphasize this view, Plato placed a sign over the gate of his Academy in Athens: LET NO ONE IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE! Plato thus became known as the maker of mathematicians, and he encouraged many geometers and algebraists to join what would later be considered the first center of philosophy and knowledge in the world. Mathematicians of ancient Greece knew that there were five, and only five, regular solids . These are three-dimensional geometrical objects whose faces are all identical to one another. The solids that satisfy this requirement are the cube, the tetrahedron (triangle-based pyramid), the octahedron, the icosahedron, and the dodecahedron. Plato admired the discovery and ascribed much importance to these solids; so they became known as the Platonic solids. The Greeks associated the five ...

  Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 580–500 BCE) was a great Greek mathematician. As a young man, he was coached by the aging Thales, and he would continue the Greek quest to turn the mathematics of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and early Indians from a practical computational discipline into a beautiful, abstract philosophy. It was Pythagoras who gave us the ubiquitous Pythagorean theorem, which allows us to determine the length of a right triangle’s hypotenuse. Today GPS and maps use this theorem—as well as our very early understanding of numbers and of geometry—to compute distances between two locations. Pythagoras was born on the Greek island of Samos, a stone’s throw from the Anatolian Plateau of Asia Minor, which at that time was also part of greater Greece. The island is home to the Temple of Hera, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (although, unlike the almost-intact Great Pyramid, this temple has only one marble column still standing). Today the main town on the island is ...