ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Timeline of ancient Greek mathematicians

So, imagine you are building a very tall tower with blocks. Each block has a different shape and size, and they all fit together perfectly to make the tower stronger and taller.

Well, in ancient Greece, there were many people called mathematicians who were really good at building ideas and theories using numbers and shapes. They worked on different things, like figuring out how to measure things or explaining how things move in the world.

The first great mathematicians were Thales and Pythagoras. They lived a long time ago, around 600 BC. Thales was really good at measuring things, like how far away a boat was from the shore. Pythagoras came up with something called the Pythagorean theorem, which is a very important math idea we still use today. It helps us figure out how long the sides of a triangle are.

After Thales and Pythagoras, there were many more great mathematicians who added new ideas to the tower. There was Euclid, who wrote a big book called the "Elements" that talked about different shapes and how they fit together. There was Archimedes, who figured out how to measure the area and volume of things like circles and spheres. And there was Hipparchus, who was really good at studying the sky and figuring out how the stars moved.

All of these different mathematicians built on each other's ideas, just like building a tower with blocks. Their ideas and theories made math stronger and taller, just like a tower. And even though these ideas were created a long, long time ago, we still use them today to help us learn about the world around us.