Thinkers Timeline

Euclid was a Greek mathematician who lived in Alexandria, in Egypt, around 300 BCE. He is sometimes called the 'father of geometry'. We know almost nothing about his personal life. We do not know where he was born, who his parents were, or when exactly he died. We are not even certain he was a single person. Some scholars have wondered whether 'Euclid' might be a name used by a group of mathematicians. What we do know is that he worked at the Library and Museum of Alexandria. This was the great centre of learning in the ancient world, founded by the kings of Egypt after Alexander the Great. Scholars from across the Greek world gathered there. Euclid taught and wrote in this setting. His great work is called the Elements. It is a textbook of geometry and number theory in 13 books. The Elements gathered together the mathematical work of earlier Greek thinkers like Pythagoras, Eudoxus, and Theaetetus. It also added Euclid's own arrangement and proofs. The Elements was used as the main geometry textbook for over 2,000 years. Until the late 19th century, almost every educated person in Europe and the Middle East had studied it. It was translated into Arabic, Latin, English, and many other languages. It is one of the most printed and studied books in human history, after only the Bible. Euclid himself remains a quiet mystery behind his enormous influence.

Archimedes was a Greek mathematician, scientist, and engineer. He was born around 287 BCE in Syracuse, a Greek city on the island of Sicily. We know little about his early life. His father was an astronomer named Phidias. He may have studied for a time at the great Library of Alexandria in Egypt, though this is not certain. Most of his life, however, was spent in Syracuse. In his time, Syracuse was an independent Greek-speaking city. The Roman Republic was growing stronger and would soon swallow most of the Mediterranean world. Archimedes worked closely with the king of Syracuse, Hiero II, and later with Hiero's grandson Hieronymus. He served the city as both a thinker and an inventor. In the year 212 BCE, Roman forces attacked Syracuse. Archimedes was about 75 years old. He had designed weapons to defend the city, including powerful catapults and machines that lifted enemy ships out of the water. The Romans took the city after a long siege of about two years. The traditional story is that a Roman soldier killed Archimedes during the chaos, even though the Roman general Marcellus had ordered that he be spared. According to later writers, Archimedes was working on a mathematical problem when the soldier arrived. He asked not to have his diagrams disturbed. The soldier killed him anyway. His tomb in Syracuse was lost for centuries. The Roman writer Cicero claimed to have rediscovered it nearly 140 years after his death.

Hypatia of Alexandria (c.350-415 CE) was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who taught in the Egyptian city of Alexandria during the late Roman Empire. She was the daughter of the mathematician Theon, a scholar connected to the great library of Alexandria, and she received an exceptional education in the mathematical and philosophical traditions of the Greek-speaking world. By her maturity she was a renowned teacher in the Neoplatonist tradition, giving public lectures and leading a private circle of students that included Christians, pagans, and members of the wealthy families of the eastern Roman Empire. She is known to have written commentaries on the great mathematical texts of her time, including Diophantus's Arithmetica, Apollonius's Conics, and Ptolemy's Almagest, and to have worked closely with her father on the preservation and editing of earlier mathematical works. Her own writings do not survive; we know her through letters from her students, particularly Synesius of Cyrene, who became a Christian bishop but continued to honour her as his intellectual guide. Alexandria in her lifetime was politically and religiously turbulent. In 415 CE she was killed by a Christian mob in the streets of the city, in circumstances that have been debated by historians ever since. Her death has been remembered for sixteen centuries as a marker of something lost.