Dela Fuente, Michael

The development of pure mathematics

The pre-Euclidean period
The Greeks divided the field of mathematics into arithmetic (the study of
“multitude,” or discrete quantity) and geometry (that of “magnitude,” or continuous
quantity) and considered both to have originated in practical activities. Proclus, in his
Commentary on Euclid, observes that geometry—literally, “measurement of land”—
first arose in surveying practices among the ancient Egyptians, for the flooding of the
Nile compelled them each year to redefine the boundaries of properties. Similarly,
arithmetic started with the commerce and trade of Phoenician merchants. Although
Proclus wrote quite late in the ancient period (in the 5th century CE), his account
drew upon views proposed much earlier—by Herodotus (mid-5th century BCE), for
example, and by Eudemus, a disciple of Aristotle (late 4th century BCE).

mathematicians of the Greco-Roman world

mathematicians of the Greco-Roman world
This map spans a millennium of prominent Greco-Roman mathematicians, from
Thales of Miletus (c. 600 BCE) to Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 400 CE).
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
However plausible, this view is difficult to check, for there is only meagre evidence of
practical mathematics from the early Greek period (roughly, the 8th through the 4th
century BCE). Inscriptions on stone, for example, reveal use of a numeral system the
same in principle as the familiar Roman numerals. Herodotus seems to have known
of the abacus as an aid for computation by both Greeks and Egyptians, and about a
dozen stone specimens of Greek abaci survive from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In
the surveying of new cities in the Greek colonies of the 6th and 5th centuries, there
was regular use of a standard length of 70 plethra (one plethron equals 100 feet) as
the diagonal of a square of side 50 plethra; in fact, the actual diagonal of the square
is 50Square root of√2 plethra, so this was equivalent to using 7/5 (or 1.4) as an
estimate for Square root of√2, which is now known to equal 1.414…. In the 6th
century BCE the engineer Eupalinus of Megara directed an aqueduct through a
mountain on the island of Samos, and historians still debate how he did it. In a
further indication of the practical aspects of early Greek mathematics, Plato
describes in his Laws how the Egyptians drilled their children in practical problems in
arithmetic and geometry; he clearly considered this a model for the Greeks to
imitate.

Such hints about the nature of early Greek practical mathematics are confirmed in
later sources—for example, in the arithmetic problems in papyrus texts from
Ptolemaic Egypt (from the 3rd century BCE onward) and the geometric manuals by
Heron of Alexandria (1st century CE). In its basic manner this Greek tradition was
much like the earlier traditions in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Indeed, it is likely that the
Greeks borrowed from such older sources to some extent.

What was distinctive of the Greeks’ contribution to mathematics—and what in effect

made them the creators of “mathematics,” as the term is usually understood—was
its development as a theoretical discipline. This means two things: mathematical
statements are general, and they are confirmed by proof. For example, the
Mesopotamians had procedures for finding whole numbers a, b, and c for which a2 +
b2 = c2 (e.g., 3, 4, 5; 5, 12, 13; or 119, 120, 169). From the Greeks came a proof of a
general rule for finding all such sets of numbers (now called Pythagorean triples): if
one takes any whole numbers p and q, both being even or both odd, then a = (p2 −
q2)/2, b = pq, and c = (p2 + q2)/2. As Euclid proves in Book X of the Elements,
numbers of this form satisfy the relation for Pythagorean triples. Further, the
Mesopotamians appear to have understood that sets of such numbers a, b, and c
form the sides of right triangles, but the Greeks proved this result (Euclid, in fact,
proves it twice: in Elements, Book I, proposition 47, and in a more general form in
Elements, Book VI, proposition 31), and these proofs occur in the context of a
systematic presentation of the properties of plane geometric figures.