Cicero – Stoicism – Roman philosophy
Cicero's philosophy: a bust of Cicero (Capitoline Museum, Rome) Who was Cicero? In the last years of the Roman Republic, great men like Julius Caesar and Pompey fought over which of [...]
Cicero's philosophy: a bust of Cicero (Capitoline Museum, Rome) Who was Cicero? In the last years of the Roman Republic, great men like Julius Caesar and Pompey fought over which of [...]
A cider press with big wooden screws What is a screw? People always count screws as a separate kind of simple machine. But really screws are just one kind of inclined plane. [...]
Clothesline pulley A pulley is really a kind of wheel, just as a screw is a kind of inclined plane. But pulleys are so important that people give them their own category. A pulley [...]
Levers: An orangutan child using a stick as a lever What is a lever? A lever is basically just a long stick that you push or pull against a fulcrum [...]
Copernicus, a Renaissance astronomer Starting in the 1200s AD, as Europe got richer, great universities got started there. In the later Middle Ages, West Asia and India suffered from the Mongol invasions. West Asian people were too poor to [...]
What is pi? The geometry of a circle What is pi? Pi is a number that is just a little bigger than 3.14. It is the number you get if you divide [...]
Greek mathematics: An Egyptian papyrus from about 100 AD which is a piece of one of Euclid's books Greek math: geometry not algebra Because people in ancient Greece had only very clumsy [...]
Eratosthenes of Cyrene went to school here! A classroom at the University of Alexandria (al-Ahram 2004). Who was Eratosthenes of Cyrene? Eratosthenes of Cyrene was born about 276 BC. He was [...]
A copy of Aristarchus of Samos' work on parchment from Constantinople, about 950 AD. It shows the relative sizes of the sun, the Earth, and the moon Aristarchus of Samos [...]
Archimedes was from Syracuse, Sicily. Here you see it with Mount Etna in the background When did Archimedes live? Archimedes was born about 287 BC, so he was a little younger [...]