Aristotle

Aristotle

384 BCE – 322 BCE

A Greek philosopher and scientist who developed syllogistic logic as a formal scholastic discipline. He defined the syllogism as a “discourse in which certain things having been stated, something else follows of necessity from their being so.”

Aristotle’s philosophy of the infinite, in which he held that only the potential infinite, and not any collection which was actually infinite, could be entertained by the reason, held great authority for 2,000 years, until Georg Cantor introduced his theory of transfinite sets in the 19th century.

Aristotle wrote widely on every field of learning, interpreted and disagreed with the writings of his teacher Plato, and served as tutor to Alexander the Great.