Timeline of ancient Greek mathematicians

Historians traditionally place the beginning of Greek mathematics proper to the age of Thales of Miletus (ca. 624–548 BC), which is indicated by the green line at 600 BC. The purple line at 300 BC indicates the approximate year in which Euclid's Elements was first published. The red line at 300 AD passes through Pappus of Alexandria (c. 290 – c. 350 AD) who was one of the last great Greek mathematicians of antiquity. Note that the solid thick black line is at year zero, which is a year that does not exist in the Anno Domini (AD) system.

The mathematicians Heliodorus of Larissa is not listed due to the uncertainty of when he lived, which was possibly during the 3rd century AD, after Ptolemy.

Of these mathematicians, those whose work stands out include:

• Thales of Miletus (c. 624/623  – c. 548/545 BC) is the first known individual to use deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' theorem. He is the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed.[1]
• Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC) was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus.
• Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 408 – c. 355 BC) is considered by some to be the greatest of classical Greek mathematicians, and in all antiquity second only to Archimedes.[2] Book V of Euclid's Elements is though to be largely due to Eudoxus.
• Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC) presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it. Aristarchus identified the "central fire" with the Sun, and he put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.[3] In On the Sizes and Distances, he calculates the sizes of the Sun and Moon, as well as their distances from the Earth in terms of Earth's radius. However, Eratosthenes (c. 276 – c. 194/195 BC) was the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth. Posidonius (c. 135 – c. 51 BC) also measured the diameters and distances of the Sun and the Moon as well as the Earth's diameter; his measurement of the diameter of the Sun was more accurate than Aristarchus', differing from the modern value by about half.
• Euclid (fl. 300 BC) is often referred to as the "founder of geometry"[4] or the "father of geometry" because of his incredibly influential treatise called the Elements, which was the first, or at least one of the first, axiomatized deductive systems.
• Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BC) is considered to be the greatest mathematician of ancient history, and one of the greatest of all time.[5][6] Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying concepts of infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems, including: the area of a circle; the surface area and volume of a sphere; area of an ellipse; the area under a parabola; the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution; the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution; and the area of a spiral.[7] He was also one of the first to apply mathematics to physical phenomena, founding hydrostatics and statics, including an explanation of the principle of the lever.
• Apollonius of Perga (c. 240 – c. 190 BC) is known for his work on conic sections and his study of geometry in 3-dimensional space. He is considered one of the greatest ancient Greek mathematicians.
• Hipparchus (c. 190 – c. 120 BC) is considered the founder of trigonometry[8] and also solved several problems of spherical trigonometry. He was the first whose quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the Sun and Moon survive and the discovery. In his work On Sizes and Distances, he measured the apparent diameters of the Sun and Moon and their distances from Earth. He is also reputed to have measured the Earth's precession.
• Diophantus (c. 201-215 – c. 285-299 AD) wrote Arithmetica which dealt with solving algebraic equations and also introduced syncopated algebra, which was a precursor to modern symbolic algebra. Because of this, Diophantus is sometimes known as "the father of algebra," which is a title he shares with Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. In contrast to Diophantus, al-Khwarizmi wasn't primarily interested in integers and he gave an exhaustive and systematic description of solving quadratic equations and some higher order algebraic equations. However, al-Khwarizmi did not use symbolic or syncopated algebra but rather "rhetorical algebra" or ancient Greek "geometric algebra" (the ancient Greeks had expressed and solved some particular instances of algebraic equations in terms of geometric properties such as length and area but they did not solve such problems in general; only particular instances). An example of "geometric algebra" is: given a triangle (or rectangle, etc.) with a certain area and also given the length of some of its sides (or some other properties), find the length of the remaining side (and justify/prove the answer with geometry). Solving such a problem is often equivalent to finding the roots of a polynomial.

The conquests of Alexander the Great around c. 330 BC led to Greek culture being spread around much of the Mediterranean region, especially in Alexandria, Egypt. This is why the Hellenistic period of Greek mathematics is typically considered as beginning in the 4th century BC. During the Hellenistic period, many mathematicians (along with other people) from various parts of the Mediterranean region that were under Greek influence adopted the Greek language and sometimes also Greek culture. Consequently, some of the Greek mathematicians from this period may not have been ethnically Greek (with respect to the modern Western notion of ethnicity). Regardless, their contemporaries considered them Greek.

• Greek mathematics
• List of Greek mathematicians

• Boyer, C.B. (1989), A History of Mathematics (2nd ed.), New York: Wiley, ISBN 978-0-471-09763-1 (1991 pbk ed. ISBN 0-471-54397-7)