Sunday, April 17, 2011

We Move

300 B.C.E.
Autolycus of Pitane (fl. c. 300)
Euclid (fl. c. 295)
Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-230)
Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212)
Philo of Byzantium (fl. c. 250)
Nicoteles of Cyrene (c. 250)
Strato (c. 250)
Persius (c. 250?)
Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276-c. 195) 
Chrysippus (280-206)
Conon of Samos (fl. c. 245)
Apollonius of Perga (c. 260-c. 185)
Nicomedes (c. 240?) 
Dositheus of Alexandria (fl. c. 230) 
Perseus (fl. 300-70 B.C.E.?)

So begins a continual downward spiral in the number of contributors to mathematics, if you know your history you will know that the Roman Empire begins expanding its tentacles outward from the Italian peninsula. It shouldn’t need to be pointed out that their interest in Math and Science was not exactly Greek like

13 comments:

  1. Man, even today, political power is valued more than scientific progress. But nevertheless, we have come a long way in our understanding of mathematics, though sometimes I wonder if we would be advancing at an exponentially higher rate if we put more focus on science.

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  2. One time my math teacher assigned us an mathematician report and my friend got Persius. She couldnt handle the grading of 250 pages (class overall) of rambling about mathematicians and she canecelled the whole assignment! Good times

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  3. Yeah, Romans were all about "pragmatic" stuff like politics, economics, laws, history, etc... Probably one of the reasons of their downfall.

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  4. I wonder where we would be if we still would have focused on mathematics like we did back then.

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  5. Roman tentacles haha. Now pereus is a name I remember.

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  6. Do the question marks mean that it's an estimated date?

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