It's All Greek at Heart

The first great mathematicians were all Greek. As Leonard Mlodinow said of the Egyptians and Babylonians that came before the Greek, "like our political leaders, they sometimes accomplished astonishing feats with surprisingly little comprehension of what they were doing. Nor did they care." The Greeks, on the other hand, did care. And so while the Egyptians built pyramids with their knowledge, the Greek mathematicians-- Euclid, Pythagoras, Thales, Eratosthenes, Archimedes, Hypatia, and many more-- are immortalized through their work in the creation of the system of mathematics and logic called geometry.

Euclid

Euclid of Alexandria (see Fig. 1) lived a long, long time ago. Almost as long ago as Pythagoras, though not quite, unless he was born over 200 years before he "flourished."