Plato

Plato was a Greek mathematician and philosopher born in Athens somewhere in between 429 and 423 BC. He was also one of ancient Greece’s most important patrons of mathematics.  Inspired by Pythagoras, he founded his Academy in Athens in 387 BC, where he stressed mathematics as a way of understanding more about reality. In his academy, some of the questions he asked his students were

the Three Classical Problems(“squaring the circle”, “doubling the cube” and “trisecting the angle”) and to some extent these problems have become identified with Plato, although he was not the first to pose them. 








He was best known for his identification of 5 regular symmetrical 3-dimensional shapes. The 5 3-dimensional shapes were called the Platonic Solids which contained the tetrahedron (constructed of 4 regular triangles), the octahedron (composed of 8 triangles), the icosahedron (composed of 20 triangles), the cube (composed of 6 squares), and the dodecahedron (made up of 12 pentagons) .

Plato was a very successful mathematician and philosopher. He was also a pioneer of education in mathematics.

Sources:
www.storyofmathematics.com/greek_plato.html

www.famous-mathematicians.com/plato/

planetmath.org/platosmathematics