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Concept
Archytas
Summary
Archytas (ˈɑrkɪtəs; Ἀρχύτας; 435/410–360/350 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician, music theorist, astronomer, statesman, and strategist. He was a scientist affiliated with the Pythagorean school and famous for being the reputed founder of mathematical mechanics and a friend of Plato.
Archytas was born in the Greek city of Taras (Tarentum), Magna Graecia, and was the son of either Mnesagoras or Hadees. For a while, he was taught by Philolaus, and taught mathematics to Eudoxus of Cnidus and to Eudoxus' student, Menaechmus.
Politically and militarily, Archytas appears to have been the dominant figure in Tarentum in his generation, somewhat comparable to Pericles in Athens a half-century earlier. The Tarentines elected him strategos ("general") seven years in a row, a step that required them to violate their own rule against successive appointments. Archytas was allegedly undefeated as a general in Tarentine campaigns against their southern Italian neighbors.
In his public career, Archytas had a reputation for virtue as well as efficacy. The Seventh Letter, traditionally attributed to Plato, asserts that Archytas attempted to rescue Plato during his difficulties with Dionysius II of Syracuse. Some scholars have argued that Archytas may have served as one model for Plato's philosopher king, and that he influenced Plato's political philosophy as expressed in The Republic and other works.
Archytas wrote a number of works in philosophy and the exact sciences but none of them survived except in fragments. As a Pythagorean, Archytas believed that arithmetic, rather than geometry, provided the basis for satisfactory proofs.
Archytas named the harmonic mean, important much later in projective geometry and number theory, though he did not discover it. According to Eutocius, Archytas solved the problem of doubling the cube (the so-called Delian problem) with an ingenious geometric construction. Hippocrates of Chios before had reduced this problem to the finding of two mean proportionals.
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