6 stories mention Plato on DeadlyCurious.
Socrates was tried for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens in 399 BCE. The 500-member jury voted 280 to 220 to convict, then by a wider margin to impose death. He drank hemlock at sunset some weeks later in the prison at the western foot of the Acropolis. He was 70.
Read the story →Eudoxus of Cnidus proposed in the 360s BC that the apparent motions of the planets could be explained by a system of 27 concentric rotating spheres centred on the Earth. Aristotle expanded the model to 55 spheres. The framework substantively defined European cosmology until Tycho Brahe.
Read the story →Hippocrates of Cos and Hippocrates of Chios were near-contemporaries — both Greek, both prominent in their fields, both with the same first name — and were occasionally confused even by ancient sources. One founded the European medical tradition; the other wrote the first textbook of European geometry.
Read the story →Plato's Academy was founded around 387 BC and closed by Justinian's edict in 529 AD. For most of that nine-century period the Academy was the institutional core of Greek mathematical and astronomical teaching — the lineage that produced Eudoxus, Aristotle, Theaetetus, and most of the substantively classical Greek mathematical tradition.
Read the story →In 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens. The Academy that traced its descent to Plato had operated for almost 900 years. Its surviving teachers, led by Damascius, walked east into Sasanian Persia. Five years later they walked back.
Read the story →Before Eudoxus, Greek mathematicians could prove statements about simple shapes. Eudoxus invented the method that let them prove statements about curves.
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