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In case of interest here is an excerpt of an online resource:
Timeline related to Greek Science and Technology
800 BCE
Vowels were by the Greeks to consonants of Phoenician origin.
610 BCE
Birth of Anaximander of Miletus.
About 600 BCE
Thales of Miletus (Θαλής ο Μιλήσιος ) arguing from the fact that wherever there is life, there is moisture, speculated that the basic stuff of nature is water, according to Aristotle. He brings Babylonian mathematical knowledge to Greece and uses geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore.
About 600 -501 BCE
Sun dial (gnomon) in use in Greece and China.
Theodorus of Samos credited with invention of ore smelting and casting, water level, lock and key, carpenter's square, and turning lathe.
First water supply system in Athens has nine pipes leading to main well.
About 585 BCE
Thales of Miletus predicts a solar eclipse.
About 560 BCE
Anaximander (Αναξίμανδρος ο Μιλήσιος ) proposes that the Earth floats unsupported in space. Its surface is cylindrical. The “author of the first geometrical model of the world...” Charles Kahn Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology
About 530 BCE
Pythagoras (Πυθαγόρας ο Σάμιος ) discovered the dependence of musical intervals on the arithmetical ratios of the lengths of string at the same tension, 2:1 giving an octave, 3:2 the fifth, and 4:3 the fourth. He is also credited with a general formula for finding two square numbers the sum of which is also a square, namely (if m is any odd number), m2+{1/2(m2-1)}2={1/2(m2+1)}2. "The Pythagoreans and Plato [as well as the Renaissance Neo-Platonists] noted that the conclusions they reached deductively agreed to a remarkable extent with the results of observation and inductive inference. Unable to account otherwise for this agreement, they were led to regard mathematics as the study of ultimate, eternal reality, immanent in nature and the universe, rather than as a branch of logic or a tool of science and technology" (Boyer 1949:1). Consequently, when the Pythagoreans developed the theory of geometric magnitudes, by which they were able to compare two surfaces' ratio, they were led, for lack of a system which could handle irrational numbers, to the 'incommensurability problem': Applying the side of a square to the diagonal, no common rational measure is discoverable.
Pythagoras proposes that sound is a vibration of air.
About 510 BCE
Almaeon of Crotona (Αλκμαίων ο Κροτωνιάτης ) a member of the Pythagorean medical circle, located the seat of perception in the brain, or enkephalos, and maintained that there were passages connecting the senses to the brain, a position he was said to have arrived at by dissections of the optic nerve.
About 500 BCE
Water system built by Eupalinus (Ευπαλίνος ο Μεγαρεύς) on Samos, three-quarter-mile-long tunnel, 20 meter deep, started simultaneously at both ends. Herodotus consider this as one of the three greatest Greek constructions.
About 500 BCE
Xenophanes examined fossils and speculated on the evolution of the earth.
Alcmaeon, Greek physician, discovers Eustachian tubes c. -500
479-431 BCE
Golden Age of Athens
About 465 BCE
Hippasus ('Ιππασος ο Μεταποντίνος) writes of a "sphere of 12 pentagons", which must refer to a dodecahedron
About 450 BCE
Anaxagoras of Athens taught that the moon shines with the light of the sun and so was able to explain the eclipses.
About 440 BCE
Leucippus of Miletus said that the world consisted in the void and atoms, which are imperceptible individual particles that differ only in size, shape, and position. That these particles were imperceptible meant they met Parmenides' objection to the Pythagorean's geometric points and, since they alone were unchanging, change could be explained as mere sense impressions. "It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that even in 1900 the only new idea to Leucippus's theory was that each chemical element was identified with a separate atomic species" (Park 1990:41).
Oenopides of Chios (Οινοπίδης ο Χίος) probably created the first three of what became Euclid's 'postulates' or assumptions. What is postulated guarantees the existence of straight lines, circles, and points of intersection. That they needed to be postulated is because they require 'movement,' the possibility of which was challenged by the Eleatics (Szabó 1978:276-279).
About 430-440 BCE
Hippocrates of Chios squared the lune, a major step toward squaring the circle, probably using the theorem that circles are to one another as the squares of their diameters. He writes the Elements which is the first compilation of the elements of geometry
Hippias of Elis (Ιππίας ο Ηλείος) invents the quadratrix which may have been used by him for trisecting an angle and squaring the circle.
Prior to about 425 BCE
Herodotus wrote the first scientific history; that is, he began by asking questions, rather than just telling what he thinks he knows. Moreover, these questions were "about things done by men at a determinate time in the past, [and the history itself ] exists in order to tell man what man is by telling him what man has done" (Collingwood 1946:18).
About 425 BCE
Theodorus of Cyrene (Θεόδωρος ο Κυρηναίος) shows that certain square roots are irrational. This had been shown earlier but it is not known by whom.
Thebans use a flame-thrower at Delium.
About 420 BCE
Democritus of Abdera (Δημόκριτος ο Αβδηρίτης) developed Leucippus's atomic theory: Atoms vibrate when hitched together in solid bodies and exist in a space which is infinite in extent and in which each star is a sun and has its own world. He also produced two major concepts in the history of ideas concerning the brain--that thought was situated there and, anticipating the nervous system, that psychic atoms constituted the material basis of its communication with the rest of the body and the world outside. Socrates, and hence the Platonic school, followed Democritus in locating thought in the brain.
About 387 BCE
Plato founds his Academy in Athens
About 375 BCE
Archytas of Tarentum develops mechanics. He studies the "classical problem" of doubling the cube and applies mathematical theory to music. He also constructs the first automaton.
About 370-360 BCE
Eudoxus of Cnidus invented a model of twenty-seven concentric spheres by which he was able to calculate the sun's annual motions through the zodiac, the moon's motion including its wobble, and the planets' retrograde motion. He used what came much later to be called the 'exhaustion method' for area determination. This method involved inscribing polygons within circles, reducing the difference ad absurdum, and was wholly geometric since there was at that time no knowledge of an arithmetical continuum, at least among the Greeks.
About 340 BCE
Aristaeus writes Five Books concerning Conic Sections.
Praxagoras of Cos discovers the difference between arteries and veins.
About 335 BCE
Strato, experiments with falling bodies and levers.
About 330 BCE
Heraclides of Pontus said that the Earth turns daily on its axis "while the heavenly things were at rest..., considered the cosmos to be infinite..., [and] with the Pythagoreans, considered each planet to be a world with an earth-like body and with an atmosphere" (Dreyer 1906:123-125). He also suggested that Mercury and Venus have the sun at the center of their spheres.
Pytheas navigated the British Isles and the northern seas and upon returning home wrote about an island that he called Thule or Ultima Thule
Aristotle, describes image projection in terms of the camera obscura
About 325 BCE
Alexander orders his admiral, Nearchus, to explore the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, and Euphrates
Pytheas, tides are caused by moon
330 BCE ??
Diving bell used
About 320 BCE
Eudemus of Rhodes writes the History of Geometry.
About 314 BCE
The first reference to the pyroelectric effect by Theophrastus who noted that tourmaline becomes charged when heated.
310 BCE
Birth of Aristarchus of Samos.
About 300 BCE
Eukleides, better known as Euclid, published his Elements, a reorganized compilation of geometrical proofs including new proofs and a much earlier essay on the foundations of arithmetic. Elements conclude with the construction of Plato's five regular solids. Euclidean space has no natural edge, and is thus infinite. In his Optica, he noted that light travels in straight lines and described the law of reflection.
About 300 BCE
Dicaiarch of Messina (350-290 BCE), Greek geographer introduces to the map making world the notion of latitude and longitude
About 290-260 BCE
Aristarchus of Samos, in On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, used trigonometry to estimate the size of the Moon and its distance by the Earth's shadow during a lunar eclipse. Archimedes and others said that he maintained that the Moon revolved around the Earth and the Earth around the Sun which remained stationary like the stars.
287 BCE
Birth of Archimedes (Αρχιμήδης ο Συρακούσιος)
276 BCE
Birth of Eratosthenes
About 270 BCE
Greek inventor Ctesibius of Alexandria includes gearing in clepsydras
About 260-250 BCE
Archimedes of Syracuse contributed numerous advances to science including the principle that a body immersed in fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid and the calculation of the value of pi. "His method was to select definite and limited problems. He then formulated hypotheses which he either regarded, in the Euclidean manner, as self-evident axioms or could verify by simple experiments. The consequences of these he then deduced and experimentally verified" (Crombie 1952:278). Description of the Loculus of Archimedes; Archimedean Polyhedra; Volume of Intersection of Two Cylinders; Archimedes' Cattle Problem. Principle of the lever , discovery of the principle of buoyancy
About 245 BCE
Callimachus of Cyrene, a scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria, "created for the first time a catalog of Greek literature covering 120,000 books, called the Pinakes or Tables
About 240 BCE
Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the diameter of the Earth by measuring noontime shadows at sites 800 km. apart. Assuming the Earth is a sphere, the measured angle between the sites is seven degrees and the circumference is about 50 times 800 km., or about 40,000 km.
About 230 BCE
Eratosthenes of Cyrene develops his sieve method for finding all prime numbers.
Before the end of the third century BCE
Astrolabes were in use for taking the angular distance between any two objects, usually the elevation in the sky of planets.
In the early second century BCE
Diocles, in On Burning Mirrors, proved the focal property of a parabola and showed how the Sun's rays can be made to reflect a point by rotating a parabolic mirror (Toomer 1978).
About 225-210 BCE?
Apollonius of Perga writes Conics. He introduced probably first the terms 'parabola' and 'hyperbola,' curves formed when a plane intersects a conic section, and 'ellipse,' a closed curve formed when a plane intersects a cone.
About 134-127 BCE
Hipparchus of Rhodes (Ιππαρχος ο Ρόδιος ) measured the year with great accuracy and built the first comprehensive star chart with 850 stars and a luminosity, or brightness, scale. He is credited with the discovery of the precision of the equinoxes, and seems to have been very impressed that either of two geometrically constructed hypotheses could 'save the appearance' of the path that a planet follows: One shows the planets moving in eccentric circles and the other moving in epicycles carried by concentric circles (Duhem 1908:8).
THANKS to a German website "miahanas". Much of the timeline is taken from there and edited down to fit in one normalsize post. http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/HistoricEvents.htm
Timeline related to Greek Science and Technology
800 BCE
Vowels were by the Greeks to consonants of Phoenician origin.
610 BCE
Birth of Anaximander of Miletus.
About 600 BCE
Thales of Miletus (Θαλής ο Μιλήσιος ) arguing from the fact that wherever there is life, there is moisture, speculated that the basic stuff of nature is water, according to Aristotle. He brings Babylonian mathematical knowledge to Greece and uses geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore.
About 600 -501 BCE
Sun dial (gnomon) in use in Greece and China.
Theodorus of Samos credited with invention of ore smelting and casting, water level, lock and key, carpenter's square, and turning lathe.
First water supply system in Athens has nine pipes leading to main well.
About 585 BCE
Thales of Miletus predicts a solar eclipse.
About 560 BCE
Anaximander (Αναξίμανδρος ο Μιλήσιος ) proposes that the Earth floats unsupported in space. Its surface is cylindrical. The “author of the first geometrical model of the world...” Charles Kahn Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology
About 530 BCE
Pythagoras (Πυθαγόρας ο Σάμιος ) discovered the dependence of musical intervals on the arithmetical ratios of the lengths of string at the same tension, 2:1 giving an octave, 3:2 the fifth, and 4:3 the fourth. He is also credited with a general formula for finding two square numbers the sum of which is also a square, namely (if m is any odd number), m2+{1/2(m2-1)}2={1/2(m2+1)}2. "The Pythagoreans and Plato [as well as the Renaissance Neo-Platonists] noted that the conclusions they reached deductively agreed to a remarkable extent with the results of observation and inductive inference. Unable to account otherwise for this agreement, they were led to regard mathematics as the study of ultimate, eternal reality, immanent in nature and the universe, rather than as a branch of logic or a tool of science and technology" (Boyer 1949:1). Consequently, when the Pythagoreans developed the theory of geometric magnitudes, by which they were able to compare two surfaces' ratio, they were led, for lack of a system which could handle irrational numbers, to the 'incommensurability problem': Applying the side of a square to the diagonal, no common rational measure is discoverable.
Pythagoras proposes that sound is a vibration of air.
About 510 BCE
Almaeon of Crotona (Αλκμαίων ο Κροτωνιάτης ) a member of the Pythagorean medical circle, located the seat of perception in the brain, or enkephalos, and maintained that there were passages connecting the senses to the brain, a position he was said to have arrived at by dissections of the optic nerve.
About 500 BCE
Water system built by Eupalinus (Ευπαλίνος ο Μεγαρεύς) on Samos, three-quarter-mile-long tunnel, 20 meter deep, started simultaneously at both ends. Herodotus consider this as one of the three greatest Greek constructions.
About 500 BCE
Xenophanes examined fossils and speculated on the evolution of the earth.
Alcmaeon, Greek physician, discovers Eustachian tubes c. -500
479-431 BCE
Golden Age of Athens
About 465 BCE
Hippasus ('Ιππασος ο Μεταποντίνος) writes of a "sphere of 12 pentagons", which must refer to a dodecahedron
About 450 BCE
Anaxagoras of Athens taught that the moon shines with the light of the sun and so was able to explain the eclipses.
About 440 BCE
Leucippus of Miletus said that the world consisted in the void and atoms, which are imperceptible individual particles that differ only in size, shape, and position. That these particles were imperceptible meant they met Parmenides' objection to the Pythagorean's geometric points and, since they alone were unchanging, change could be explained as mere sense impressions. "It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that even in 1900 the only new idea to Leucippus's theory was that each chemical element was identified with a separate atomic species" (Park 1990:41).
Oenopides of Chios (Οινοπίδης ο Χίος) probably created the first three of what became Euclid's 'postulates' or assumptions. What is postulated guarantees the existence of straight lines, circles, and points of intersection. That they needed to be postulated is because they require 'movement,' the possibility of which was challenged by the Eleatics (Szabó 1978:276-279).
About 430-440 BCE
Hippocrates of Chios squared the lune, a major step toward squaring the circle, probably using the theorem that circles are to one another as the squares of their diameters. He writes the Elements which is the first compilation of the elements of geometry
Hippias of Elis (Ιππίας ο Ηλείος) invents the quadratrix which may have been used by him for trisecting an angle and squaring the circle.
Prior to about 425 BCE
Herodotus wrote the first scientific history; that is, he began by asking questions, rather than just telling what he thinks he knows. Moreover, these questions were "about things done by men at a determinate time in the past, [and the history itself ] exists in order to tell man what man is by telling him what man has done" (Collingwood 1946:18).
About 425 BCE
Theodorus of Cyrene (Θεόδωρος ο Κυρηναίος) shows that certain square roots are irrational. This had been shown earlier but it is not known by whom.
Thebans use a flame-thrower at Delium.
About 420 BCE
Democritus of Abdera (Δημόκριτος ο Αβδηρίτης) developed Leucippus's atomic theory: Atoms vibrate when hitched together in solid bodies and exist in a space which is infinite in extent and in which each star is a sun and has its own world. He also produced two major concepts in the history of ideas concerning the brain--that thought was situated there and, anticipating the nervous system, that psychic atoms constituted the material basis of its communication with the rest of the body and the world outside. Socrates, and hence the Platonic school, followed Democritus in locating thought in the brain.
About 387 BCE
Plato founds his Academy in Athens
About 375 BCE
Archytas of Tarentum develops mechanics. He studies the "classical problem" of doubling the cube and applies mathematical theory to music. He also constructs the first automaton.
About 370-360 BCE
Eudoxus of Cnidus invented a model of twenty-seven concentric spheres by which he was able to calculate the sun's annual motions through the zodiac, the moon's motion including its wobble, and the planets' retrograde motion. He used what came much later to be called the 'exhaustion method' for area determination. This method involved inscribing polygons within circles, reducing the difference ad absurdum, and was wholly geometric since there was at that time no knowledge of an arithmetical continuum, at least among the Greeks.
About 340 BCE
Aristaeus writes Five Books concerning Conic Sections.
Praxagoras of Cos discovers the difference between arteries and veins.
About 335 BCE
Strato, experiments with falling bodies and levers.
About 330 BCE
Heraclides of Pontus said that the Earth turns daily on its axis "while the heavenly things were at rest..., considered the cosmos to be infinite..., [and] with the Pythagoreans, considered each planet to be a world with an earth-like body and with an atmosphere" (Dreyer 1906:123-125). He also suggested that Mercury and Venus have the sun at the center of their spheres.
Pytheas navigated the British Isles and the northern seas and upon returning home wrote about an island that he called Thule or Ultima Thule
Aristotle, describes image projection in terms of the camera obscura
About 325 BCE
Alexander orders his admiral, Nearchus, to explore the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, and Euphrates
Pytheas, tides are caused by moon
330 BCE ??
Diving bell used
About 320 BCE
Eudemus of Rhodes writes the History of Geometry.
About 314 BCE
The first reference to the pyroelectric effect by Theophrastus who noted that tourmaline becomes charged when heated.
310 BCE
Birth of Aristarchus of Samos.
About 300 BCE
Eukleides, better known as Euclid, published his Elements, a reorganized compilation of geometrical proofs including new proofs and a much earlier essay on the foundations of arithmetic. Elements conclude with the construction of Plato's five regular solids. Euclidean space has no natural edge, and is thus infinite. In his Optica, he noted that light travels in straight lines and described the law of reflection.
About 300 BCE
Dicaiarch of Messina (350-290 BCE), Greek geographer introduces to the map making world the notion of latitude and longitude
About 290-260 BCE
Aristarchus of Samos, in On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, used trigonometry to estimate the size of the Moon and its distance by the Earth's shadow during a lunar eclipse. Archimedes and others said that he maintained that the Moon revolved around the Earth and the Earth around the Sun which remained stationary like the stars.
287 BCE
Birth of Archimedes (Αρχιμήδης ο Συρακούσιος)
276 BCE
Birth of Eratosthenes
About 270 BCE
Greek inventor Ctesibius of Alexandria includes gearing in clepsydras
About 260-250 BCE
Archimedes of Syracuse contributed numerous advances to science including the principle that a body immersed in fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid and the calculation of the value of pi. "His method was to select definite and limited problems. He then formulated hypotheses which he either regarded, in the Euclidean manner, as self-evident axioms or could verify by simple experiments. The consequences of these he then deduced and experimentally verified" (Crombie 1952:278). Description of the Loculus of Archimedes; Archimedean Polyhedra; Volume of Intersection of Two Cylinders; Archimedes' Cattle Problem. Principle of the lever , discovery of the principle of buoyancy
About 245 BCE
Callimachus of Cyrene, a scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria, "created for the first time a catalog of Greek literature covering 120,000 books, called the Pinakes or Tables
About 240 BCE
Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the diameter of the Earth by measuring noontime shadows at sites 800 km. apart. Assuming the Earth is a sphere, the measured angle between the sites is seven degrees and the circumference is about 50 times 800 km., or about 40,000 km.
About 230 BCE
Eratosthenes of Cyrene develops his sieve method for finding all prime numbers.
Before the end of the third century BCE
Astrolabes were in use for taking the angular distance between any two objects, usually the elevation in the sky of planets.
In the early second century BCE
Diocles, in On Burning Mirrors, proved the focal property of a parabola and showed how the Sun's rays can be made to reflect a point by rotating a parabolic mirror (Toomer 1978).
About 225-210 BCE?
Apollonius of Perga writes Conics. He introduced probably first the terms 'parabola' and 'hyperbola,' curves formed when a plane intersects a conic section, and 'ellipse,' a closed curve formed when a plane intersects a cone.
About 134-127 BCE
Hipparchus of Rhodes (Ιππαρχος ο Ρόδιος ) measured the year with great accuracy and built the first comprehensive star chart with 850 stars and a luminosity, or brightness, scale. He is credited with the discovery of the precision of the equinoxes, and seems to have been very impressed that either of two geometrically constructed hypotheses could 'save the appearance' of the path that a planet follows: One shows the planets moving in eccentric circles and the other moving in epicycles carried by concentric circles (Duhem 1908:8).
THANKS to a German website "miahanas". Much of the timeline is taken from there and edited down to fit in one normalsize post. http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/HistoricEvents.htm
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