My mathematician would likely be someone who has done something significant in

the field of Mathematics and other fields of study related to it. One of these is Zeno of Elea.
Zeno was born around 490 B.E.C. at southern Italian City of Elea. Little is known of the life of
Zeno. Plato says that Zeno and Parmenides visited Athens about 449 B.C., where the young
Socrates made their acquaintance and where Zeno made a striking impression. He would
appear to have been active in Magna Graecia, that is, the Greek-speaking regions of southern
Italy, during the mid-fifth century B.C.E. There is otherwise little credible information about
the circumstances of his life. Ancient authorities asserted that, like Parmenides, Zeno was a
Pythagorean, that he engaged in political activity in his native city, and that he was put to
death for plotting against a tyrant. An oft-repeated story tells of his bravery under torture
and the painful death which he endured.
Zeno’s areas of expertise were his series of paradoxes. He was a pre-
Socratic Greek philosopher of Magna Graecia and a member of the Eleatic School founded
by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic. He is best known for
its paradoxes, which Bertrand Russell has described as "immeasurably subtle and profound.
His mentor is Parmenides. Zeno is especially known for his paradoxes that contributed to the
development of logical and mathematical rigor and that were insoluble until the
development of precise concepts of continuity and infinity. It is usually assumed, based
on Plato's Parmenides that Zeno took on the project of creating these paradoxes because
other philosophers had created paradoxes against Parmenides' view. Thus, Plato has Zeno
say the purpose of the paradoxes "is to show that their hypothesis that existences are many,
if properly followed up, leads to still more absurd results than the hypothesis that they are
one. Zeno made use of three premises: first, that any unit has magnitude; second, that it is
infinitely divisible; and third, that it is indivisible. Yet he incorporated arguments for each: for
the first premise, he argued that that which, added to or subtracted from something else,
does not increase or decrease the second unit is nothing; for the second, that a unit, being
one, is homogeneous and that therefore, if divisible, it cannot be divisible at one point rather
than another; for the third, that a unit, if divisible, is divisible either into extended minima,
which contradicts the second premise or, because of the first premise, into nothing. He had
in his hands a very powerful complex argument in the form of a dilemma, one horn of which
supposed indivisibility, the other infinite divisibility, both leading to a contradiction of the
original hypothesis. Zeno sets to prove the unity of existence mathematically. His best
known are The Race Course, The Achilles, The Arrow, and The Stadium, all of which prove the
logical impossibility of plurality and motion. The paradox of The Race Course, to use just one
example, shows how motion is a lie of the senses and cannot logically exist. This paradox
claims that, if a runner is to sprint 100 meters, she must first travel half that distance. In order
to travel half that distance, she must first travel half that distance and, to do that, she must
first travel half that distance. By this progression, Zeno showed that, no matter how small a
distance was left, it was still impossible, logically, for the runner to ever meet her goal. No
matter how far or near, there would always be a distance which separated the runner from
the goal. That Zeno was arguing against actual opponents, Pythagoreans who believed in a
plurality composed of numbers that were thought of as extended units, is a matter of
controversy. It is not likely that any mathematical implications received attention in his
lifetime. But in fact, the logical problems which his paradoxes raise about a
mathematical continuum are serious, fundamental, and inadequately solved by Aristotle. The
discovery of Zeno about his paradoxes is argued and disagrees by some of the later
mathematician and some enhanced his paradoxes and used it to more conducive learning in
the field of Mathematics.
His method had great influence and may be summarized as follows: he continued
Parmenides’ abstract, analytic manner but started from his opponents’ theses and refuted
them by reductio ad absurdum. His works also is used by other mathematician in creating
fundamentals in the field of Mathematics and other studies. Through his discoveries, it is
remarkable that, while many of the responses to Zeno’s paradoxes, and even some modern
formulations of the paradoxes themselves, depend on advanced mathematical techniques,
Zeno’s original arguments do not themselves appear to have involved any particularly
complicated mathematics. Several of the paradoxes involve no specifically mathematical
notions at all. The Achilles is perhaps the best example since it employs only very ordinary
notions, such as getting to where another has started from. The other extant arguments for
the most part deploy similarly prosaic notions: being somewhere or being in a place, being in
motion, moving past something else, getting halfway there, being of some size, having parts,
being one, being like, being the same, and so on. While one might suppose that Zeno’s turn
to a more strictly quantitative conception of limit and limitlessness could have been inspired
by his familiarity with Pythagorean philosophers and mathematicians in Magna Graecia, we
can in fact trace the philosophy of limiters and unlimited only back as far as Philolaus, a
Pythagorean roughly contemporary with Socrates and thus a good deal younger than Zeno.
Whatever may have spurred Zeno’s development of his collection of paradoxes, his
arguments quickly achieved a remarkable level of notoriety. They had an immediate impact
on Greek physical theory. Zeno’s arguments also had a formative influence on Aristotle’s own
theory of the continuum and of continuous motion. More generally, Zeno’s arguments made
it necessary for Greek natural philosophers to develop something more than an everyday
conception of the composition of material bodies. That mathematicians and physicists have
worked ever since to develop responses to the more ingenious of his paradoxes is
remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, for immunity to his paradoxes might be taken as
a condition upon the adequacy of our most basic physical concepts. Mathematicians,
however, realizing that Zeno's arguments were fatal to infinitesimals, saw that they could
only avoid the difficulties connected with them by once and for all banishing the idea of the
infinite, even the potentially infinite, altogether from their science; thenceforth, therefore,
they made no use of magnitudes increasing or decreasing ad infinitum, but contented
themselves with finite magnitudes that can be made as great or as small as we please.

References/Bibliography

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016) Zeno of Elea. Retrieved

from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zeno-elea/#Bib

Mark, J.J. (2009, September 02). Zeno of Elea. Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved
from https://www.ancient.eu/Zeno_of_Elea/

Britannica Encyclopedia, Inc (2019). Zeno of Elea. Greek Philosopher and Mathematician.
Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy

JOC/EFR (February 1999). Zeno of Elea. Retrieved from http://www-groups.dcs.st-

and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Zeno_of_Elea.html
LoveToKnow,Corp(2019). Zeno of Elea. Retrieved
from https://biography.yourdictionary.com/zeno-of-elea

Wikipedia contributors. (2019, June 17). Zeno of Elea. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved 09:22, July 28, 2019,
from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zeno_of_Elea&oldid=902240382