Thales was the first person who made great contribution to the birth of mathematics. He used the shadow of the sun to calculate the height of the pyramid, in fact, he used the properties similar to triangles. He made it clear that right angles are equal to each other; The base angles of isosceles triangles are equal; A circle is divided into two by any diameter; If two triangles have one side and the two angles on this side are equal, then the two triangles are congruent; But it also proves this point. This knowledge seems simple now, but it was great at that time.
After Ju Lushi, later scholars headed by Pythagoras made contributions to mathematics. One of their most outstanding achievements is the discovery of Pythagorean Theorem, which is called "Wadagoras Theorem" in the West. It was this theorem that led to the discovery of irrational numbers and the first mathematical crisis.
Zhi Nuo, who was later than Pythagoras, put forward four famous paradoxes, which had an important influence on the development of mathematical concepts in the future.
With the efforts of Thales and Zhi Nuo, mathematics in ancient Greece has made a brand-new development. Euclid absorbed the essence and wrote the most famous work in the history of mathematics, Geometry Elements. What people know about plane geometry today comes from this book.
After Euclid, Archimedes initiated a new period in the development of Greek mathematics, which was called the Alexandria period. Archimedes' work in mathematics went far beyond his time and was called "the God of Mathematics" by later generations. He designed a large number system, even if the whole universe is full of tiny grains of sand, the number of grains of sand can be easily counted. By making more and more inscribed regular polygons and circumscribed regular polygons, he calculated the value of pi from 3 107 1 to 37 1. He got the formula to calculate the area and volume, and also invented the snail money named after him.
After Archimedes, mathematics in ancient Greece paid more attention to application. With the development of astronomy, Hippocrates, Menelaus and Ptolemy founded trigonometry. Nicole Matthews wrote the first monograph on number theory-Introduction to Arithmetic, while Diophantine systematically studied various equations, especially various indefinite equations. In this way, all branches of elementary mathematics-arithmetic, number theory, algebra, geometry and triangles have been established, which means that the mathematical "baby" conceived by Babylonians and ancient Egyptians was finally born in the cradle of ancient Greece.