You know something of  Ancient Greece. Perhaps you  have heard words like  Athens (Atenas), the Trojan War (Guerra de Troya), the Battle of Thermopylae (Batalla de las Termópilas), the Ancient Olympic Games, Alexander the Great (Alejandro Magno) or perhaps you have seen some documentaries about them.

Today we know much about ancient Greeks because they left their knowledge written behind.

The Greeks studied all kind of topics: Nature, Geography, History, Art, Literature, Logic and, of course, Mathematics. But the ancient Greeks not only knew one topic, they knew several topics, they were philosophers (Philosophy means “Love to Knowledge”, in Greek language). These philosophers were the fathers of  Science. Today we use a lot of scientific words which have their origin in Ancient Greece, for example: kilometre, Geography, Geometry, Pathology.

You know that Greece is a country  East of  Mediterranean Sea, but the ancient Greeks were tradesmen and they traveled around all cities along the Mediterranean                                                    

Coast and many of them stayed in cities outside of Greece, for

example,  the famous mathematician Pythagoras lived in Croton,  South of Italy.

Because of their journeys Greeks knew other cultures such as the  Egyptians and the Mesopotamians.

I have said that Greek Philosophers were the fathers of Science, but they also were the fathers of Mathematics. Their studies about Mathematics were mainly related to Geometry, the knowledge that they had about Geometry was almost as that we have today. All people know the theorem of  Pythagoras: The sum of squares of legs of a right triangle is equal to square of the hypotenuse. Although Egyptians applied a  particular relation like   to obtain a right triangle, they did not know that relation can be applied in all right triangles.

Other mathematicians of Ancient Greece were Thales of Miletus and Euclid of Alexandria. Thales discovered another famous theorem and Euclid wrote many books of Mathematics. Greeks also gave us much knowledge about Arithmetic: prime numbers and an idea so difficult as irrational number (a number which cannot be represented as quotient between integer numbers).

 We could be talking about Greek Mathematics and Greek Mathematicians for years…

 ACTIVITIES:

· Search the meaning of words in bold letters in the text.

· Search where Isle of Samos, Miletus (Mileto), Mesopotamia, Athens and Alexandria are (Know modern countries where they belong)

· Search some words (three or four) whose origins are in Ancient Greece, different from those given in the text.

· Search some philosophers from Ancient Greece, different from those given in the text.

· Know what theorem of Pythagoras says.