school, we know little, except that, while in prison, he passed his time attempting to square the circle. This is the first time, in the history of mathematics, that we find mention of the famous problem of the quadrature of the circle, that rock upon which so many reputations have been destroyed. It turns upon the determination of the exact value of . Approximations to had been made by the Chinese, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Egyptians. But the invention of a method to find its exact value, is the knotty problem which has engaged the attention of many minds from the time of Anaxagoras down to our own. Anaxagoras did not offer any solution of it, and seems to have luckily escaped paralogisms.
About the time of Anaxagoras, but isolated from the Ionic school, flourished Œnopides of Chios. Proclus ascribes to him the solution of the following problems: From a point without, to draw a perpendicular to a given line, and to draw an angle on a line equal to a given angle. That a man could gain a reputation by solving problems so elementary as these, indicates that geometry was still in its infancy, and that the Greeks had not yet gotten far beyond the Egyptian constructions.
The Ionic school lasted over one hundred years. The progress of mathematics during that period was slow, as compared with its growth in a later epoch of Greek history. A new impetus to its progress was given by Pythagoras.
The School of Pythagoras.
Pythagoras (580?–500? B.C.) was one of those figures which impressed the imagination of succeeding times to such an extent that their real histories have become difficult to be discerned through the mythical haze that envelops them. The following account of Pythagoras excludes the most doubtful
