Thales was born in Melitus, the premier city of Archaic Greece. Herodotus, a Greek historian from the fifth century BC, and Aristotle are main source for his life and work.
As a young man, he travelled to Egypt and the Near East to study geometry, a branch of mathematics concerned with points, lines and surfaces in two dimensions.
Even though little is known about his life, Thales came to be known as the first the ‘Seven Sages’ (wise men) of the ancient world.
He founded a school of natural philosophy in Ionia, a city on the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor, where he espoused his theory that the earth was flat, and it and everything on it floated on a huge body of water from which they originated and to which they would all return.
Thales of Miletus, famed as the originator of Greek philosophy and since, as is shown by the stories of his prediction of the solar eclipse of 585 BC.
He was known as the founder of Greek mathematics and astronomy as well as of philosophy. Thales is said to have introduced geometry to Greece and to have developed the abstract geometry of lines.
It was Thales of Miletus who was accredited with the discovery of the electrostatic attraction created after the material amber was rubbed. Thales noted after amber was rubbed straw was attracted to the piece of amber.
Thales of Miletus (624-546 BC)
