Ancient Greek Essay
Developments in Science and Medicine in Ancient Greece
Although no great revolution took place, Ancient Greece was a place of great thinkers and revolutionary ideas that expanded upon each other. It all began when the original thinkers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, began to move away from mythological views and move to more rational and explained ones (Nagle 87). They wanted to know the answers to the big questions like – what is the universe made of and how did it come into being. Thales thought the original substance was water and Anaximenes thought it was air (Webster 31). While Anaximander though the universe worked geometrically and worked on a system of natural exchanges (Nagle 87). During this time, as well, Pythagoras discovered …show more content…
Rihll states, “Mathematics probably ranks as the Greeks’ greatest achievement” (Rihll 39). Which is interesting because it is not exactly what we think of mathematics today because they did not use what are now our basic symbols like the plus sign (+), minus sign (-), or even the equals sign (=) and they used pebbles to do calculations (Rihll 41). A lot of these finding came during the Hellenistic period. Euclid was a pioneer in geometry- many of the things he contributed to the subject with Elements- still are true today (Rihll 54). Some examples of his postulates are: “[It is possible] to draw a straight line from any point to any point, ‘’ to describe a circle with an centre and diameter, and all right angles are equal to one another” (Rihll 55). These postulates paved the way other great thinkers viewed geometry and influenced the other developments in mathematics. Another mathematical development that came from ancient Greece is Pythagoras’ theorem. This theorem is still important to all math and science classes. Archimedes discovered things in many different subject but he invented integral calculus and gave us the calculated vale of pi (Nagle
Although no great revolution took place, Ancient Greece was a place of great thinkers and revolutionary ideas that expanded upon each other. It all began when the original thinkers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, began to move away from mythological views and move to more rational and explained ones (Nagle 87). They wanted to know the answers to the big questions like – what is the universe made of and how did it come into being. Thales thought the original substance was water and Anaximenes thought it was air (Webster 31). While Anaximander though the universe worked geometrically and worked on a system of natural exchanges (Nagle 87). During this time, as well, Pythagoras discovered …show more content…
Rihll states, “Mathematics probably ranks as the Greeks’ greatest achievement” (Rihll 39). Which is interesting because it is not exactly what we think of mathematics today because they did not use what are now our basic symbols like the plus sign (+), minus sign (-), or even the equals sign (=) and they used pebbles to do calculations (Rihll 41). A lot of these finding came during the Hellenistic period. Euclid was a pioneer in geometry- many of the things he contributed to the subject with Elements- still are true today (Rihll 54). Some examples of his postulates are: “[It is possible] to draw a straight line from any point to any point, ‘’ to describe a circle with an centre and diameter, and all right angles are equal to one another” (Rihll 55). These postulates paved the way other great thinkers viewed geometry and influenced the other developments in mathematics. Another mathematical development that came from ancient Greece is Pythagoras’ theorem. This theorem is still important to all math and science classes. Archimedes discovered things in many different subject but he invented integral calculus and gave us the calculated vale of pi (Nagle