Western History 30: Who were some of the great Ancient Greek Mathematicians?

While the Greeks borrowed heavily from the Mathematics rich cultures of Egypt and Babylonia their own contributions as outlined in the table below are significant.

Table 7 Greek Mathematicians

Name of Mathematician	Key Contribution
Apollonius of Perga	Geometer – Famed for work on conic sections – ellipse, parabola, hyperbola
Archimedes of Syracuse	One of the greatest minds of antiquity. Areas of mathematical concern include – area of a circle, anticipation of calculus, surface area and volume of a sphere, approximation of pi and the area under a parabola.
Diophantus of Alexandria	Father of Algebra. Work centred on Algebraic Equations.
Eratosthenes	Besides inventing the discipline of geography he was the first person to make use of Geometry to determine the circumference and diameter of the Earth. Was also involved in developing a method to identify prime numbers.
Euclid of Alexandria	Father of Geometry. Author of the Great work – The Elements – which deduces the Principles of Geometry from several axiomatic principles.
Hipparchus of Nicacea	Cofounder of Trigonometry. Discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes, developed trigonometric tables and solved several problems in spherical trigonometry.
Pythagoras of Samos	Although he is best known for his famous hypotenuse squared formula (that every student at one time or another has been forced to come to terms with) he did not derive this expression himself but merely popularized its usage (the Babylonians beat him to the punch). Pythagoras did however elucidate some of the mathematics that make the mathematics of music harmonics possible.
Thales of Milletus	Besides being the Father of Western Philosophy, Thales was a renowned Geometer who showed amongst other proofs that the diameter of a circle subtends a triangle with a right angle at the circumference (arguably the oldest proof in Geometry).