Mathematics in Ancient Greece Essay

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Mathematical Happenings between Ancient Egypt and the 11th Century: Thales and Pythagoras Inspire the Grecian World

In the 6th century, mathematics came to Greece and helped launch the next stage of mathematical evolution in the history of the West. Responsible for this movement were two people—first, Thales of Miletus; second, Pythagoras of Samos (Lewinter & Widulski, 2002). This paper will explain the important contributions that these two mathematicians made in this period of ancient history and show how they were received by the world.

While most people remember ancient Greece for introducing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to the world, the pre-Socratic mathematicians and philosophers Thales and Pythagoras actually helped to set the stage for the future philosophers by advancing the ideas and theorems that would push the envelope in terms of mathematical thought and philosophy. After all, it was Pythagoras and his school that coined the phrase, “All is number” (NRich, 2011). “All is number” was, in fact, the motto of the Pythagorean School. The members of this school believed that the universe was explainable by numbers—i.e., mathematics.

Where did Pythagoras get his ideas? At around the age of 20, he had left Greece and traveled east to a place known as Miletus in present-day Turkey. There he encountered an elder named Thales. Pythagoras learned a great deal about cosmology, geometry, music, astronomy and philosophy—and at the center of all of it was the number.

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Mathematics explained so much of life and the world. However, in 525 BC, Pythagoras was taken prisoner and sent to Babylon. While there he continued his studies and advanced his understanding of music and mathematics under the tutelage of the Babylonians (NRich, 2011).

Pythagoras was responsible for applying a qualitative nature to numbers, viewing some as perfect, others as incomplete, some as masculine, others as feminine, some as ugly and some as beautiful (NRich, 2011). He was also the first to make distinctions between even and odd numbers, introduced the concept of prime numbers and distinguished them from composite numbers. In Pythagoras’ view, the number 10 was the greatest and most perfect number of all. Why? He saw that 10 was the sum of the first four numbers and that when these numbers, represented by dots, were placed in a formation, one at the bottom, two atop one, three atop two, and four atop three, the resulting image was a perfect triangle.

Pythagoras is best known for the Pythagorean theorem, which was a method he developed that proved the ancient Babylonian concept regarding how parts of triangles are related in terms of size (NRich, 2011). Pythagoras deduced that the earth was round and that the heavenly….....

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