...The move towards a rational understanding of nature began at least since the Archaic period in Greece (650 BCE – 480 BCE) with the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The philosopher Thales (7th and 6 centuries BCE), dubbed "the Father of Science" for refusing to accept various supernatural, religious or mythological explanations for natural phenomena, proclaimed that every event had a natural cause.[2] Thales also made advancements in 580 BC by suggesting that water is the basic element, experimenting with magnets and attraction to rubbed amber, and formulating the first cosmologies. Anaximander, famous for his proto-evolutionary theory, disputed the ideas of Thales and proposed that rather than water, a substance called apeiron was the building block of all matter. Heraclitus (around 500BC) proposed that the only basic law governing the universe was the principal of change and that nothing remains in the same state indefinitely. This observation made him one of the first scholars in ancient physics to address the role of time in the universe, one of the most important concepts even in the modern history of physics. The early physicist Leucippus (first half of 5th century BCE) adamantly opposed the idea of direct divine intervention in the universe, instead proposing that natural phenomena had a natural cause. Leucippus and his student, Democritus, were the first to develop the theory of atomism – the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements...
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...trigonometric functions of sine, cosine, and tangent. The functions of sine cosine and tangent are used in a variety of ways from finding refraction angles of waves to finding the angles or sides in a triangle. Two main mathematicians that have helped improve the knowledge of trigonometric functions are Aristarchus of Samos and Hipparchus. Both of these men are from the B.C. era but both made advancements with trigonometric functions using what they had. Each of the mathematicians has impacted the world of math greatly and also has influenced society today. Aristarchus of Samos was one of the mathematicians who contributed to trigonometric functions and was born in 310 BC in Samos Greece. As an astronomer Aristarchus studied the earth and material universe beyond earth’s atmosphere. Like his predecessors Aristarchus of Samos believed in the idea of a Hellenistic world system or that the Sun was the center of the universe. In his studies he found that the “…earth rotates daily on its own axis, and revolves yearly around the sun (Almanac of Famous People, 2011, p. 1)…” Like many astronomers Aristarchus of Samos used trigonometric functions to come up with his theories of the universe. Aristarchus used his knowledge of the...
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