Ancients Flashcards
Thales Ionia, where the city of Miletus was located. The first scientist. Students: Anaximander and Pythagoras.
He replaced superstitions with science. Rationalist. Not experiment. What we know of him was generally written hundreds of years after he lived, by Aristotle for example. You don’t have to be Hapi to make the Nile flood——————— African rains. Earth flat disk floating in water: Waves hit earth, cause quakes. Not angry Zeus. Thales established the Milesian school in Ionia. The World’s First Science Student Anaximander was one of Thales’ first students, perhaps the very first. Pythagoras was one of his later students. Pythagoras was also taught by Anaximander. Thales’ core belief was that rational explanations rather than the Ancient Greek gods should be used to account for natural phenomena. In its most fundamental form, all matter is water. About 200 years later, Thales’ idea transformed by his later compatriot Democritus into “all matter is atoms.” He was the first person to use deductive logic to find new results in geometry and, through requiring proof of theorems. Establishing pure mathematics as a separate discipline from applied mathematics.
Anaximander
Anaximander c. 610 BC – c. 546 BC. An ancient scientific revolution: the first person in history to recognize that our planet is free in space and does not need to sit on something.
Democritus. 460BC - 370BC Democritus was born in Abdera, Greece in 460BC. He lived to be 90 years old, dying in the year 370BC.
1.All matter consists of invisible particles called atoms. 2. Atoms are indestructible. 3. Atoms are solid but invisible. 4. Atoms are homogenous. 5. Atoms differ in size, shape, mass, position, and arrangement. ->Solids are made of small, pointy atoms. ->Liquids are made of large, round atoms. ->Oils are made of very fine, small atoms that can easily slip past each other. He published over 70 books. Born to a family of wealth. Very close with his father. He studied pythagoreanism for a brief part of his life. Enjoyed traveling; visited many places.
Brahmagupta AD 597 – 668. Established zero as a number and defined its mathematical properties; discovered the formula for solving quadratic equations. Brahmasputha Siddhanta. 628 AD Brahmagupta’s book
The familiar Hindu-Arabic system of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9… brought with it ease of calculation and the recognition that zero was a number in its own right. Mathematical rules for the correct use of zero were first written in 628 AD in Brahmagupta’s book Brahmasputha Siddhanta. This book also highlighted the use of negative numbers in, for example, solutions of quadratic equations. Leonardo Fibonacci brought the Hindu-Arabic number system to Europe in 1202 AD.
Pythagoras
C: 570 -497 BC. Believed the universe was constructed using mathematics and everything could be described with numbers; established a link between mathematics and music. Scales. Numeric whole number ratios. proved Pythagoras’s theorem; discovered irrational numbers; discovered the Platonic Solids.
Lucretius. (c. 99—c. 55 B.C.E.)
(Titus Lucretius Carus) was a Roman poet and the author of the philosophical epic De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe), a comprehensive exposition of the Epicurean world-view. Naturalistic explanation of the physical origin, structure, and destiny of the universe. Included in this presentation are theories of the atomic structure of matter and the emergence and evolution of life forms. materialism, mechanism, and atomism. Epicurus is a materialist, not an atheist. Although he argues that not only our earth and all its life forms, but also all human civilizations and arts came into being and evolved without any aid or sponsorship from the gods, he does not deny their existence.
Hippocrates. 460 BC – c. 370 BC
Hippocrates is famous because: he systematized medicine he founded antiquity’s greatest school of physicians he invented the famous Hippocratic he and his followers wrote a large body of medical literature Some of the successes of the Hippocratic School were: attributing diseases to natural rather than supernatural causes treating diseases through rational reasoning rather than magic or sacrifices to gods identifying that environment, diet, and lifestyle can contribute to ill-health emphasizing kindness, gentleness, and cleanliness in treatments ensuring practitioners operated in a professional way, including keeping medical records for each patient prognosis – detailed record-keeping for many patients enabled physicians to know the likely path an illness would take Some of its failures were: a lack of understanding of human anatomy – dissections of human bodies were illegal the pseudoscientific practice of relating diseases and ill-health to imbalances in ‘humors’ of black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile an over-reliance on nature’s own healing power to cure illnesses: even in ancient times, this was criticized: Asclepiades of Bithynia in the second century BC described it as a “meditation upon death.” In the Hippocratic texts Epidemics I and III, of the 42 case histories reported, over half ended with the patient’s death.
