HackingTheUniverse

Euclid was a Greek mathematician and scholar who worked in Alexandria during the rule of Ptolemy. Euclid is best known for his vast collection of mathematics and geometry in a series of books called, “The Elements”. While it is possible that most of the work compiled in The Elements had been discovered previously by others, Euclid was the first to organize and document it. (the works of Pythagoras, Theaetetus and Eudoxus were included) The basic postulates of geometry in this work, established what became known as the geometry of a plane, or Euclidean geometry and became an important standard until non-Euclidean geometry, or the geometry of curved spaces was established over two thousand years later. The Elements included sections on number theory, irrational numbers, and “the method of exhaustion” from Eudoxus which was a forerunner of calculus.

PRECURSOR:
-0624 – Thales
-0575 – Pythagoras
-0425 – Plato
-0417 – Theaetetus
-0408 – Eudoxus

CONCURRENT:
-0287 – Archimedes

SUBSEQUENT:
-0276 – Eratosthenes
-0262 – Apollonius
0010 – Heron
0335 – Theon
0370 – Hypatia
0980 – ibn Sina
1048 – Omar Khayyam
1588 – Mersenne
1829 – Non-Euclidean geometry

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