Aristotle was the first of all polymaths and was known because he wrote about things such as sterility to the shape of seashells, poetry and art, and interpreting dreams. Aristotle is known as the founder of logic. Aristotle made possible our better understanding of the world to become more organized, when he separated human knowledge into individual categories.

In an extinct Greek colony on the coast of Thrace named Stagirus, in 384 B.C., Aristotle was born. When his father passed away, Aristotle was taken to Atarneus where his cousin, Proxenus, raised him. At seventeen, Proxenus sent Aristotle off to Athens to study under Plato at the academy. For twenty years he stayed at the academy and in the later years, he began to lecture on his own accord. Aristotle thought when Plato died in 347 B.C., he would become the Academy’s leader, but Plato and Aristotle had a huge disagreement between them, and Plato’s nephew took his spot. Soon after, Aristotle left for Hermeas’s court, ruler of Atarneus in Assos and Mysia. He remained for three years where Aristotle married Pythias, the niece of the King. Later in his life, Aristotle married another woman, Herpyllis, and together, they had a son named Nichomachus. After three years, the Persians conquered Hermeas, which prompted Aristotle to travel to Mytilene. Aristotle was solicited to instruct Philip of Macedonia’s thirteen-year-old son, Alexander (soon to become Alexander the Great), where he continued to do so for over the next five years. Philip and Alexander both paid high honor to Aristotle and awarded him funds from the Macedonian court for teaching and had thousands of the slaves to collect specimens for his natural science studies. When Philip died, Alexander became king and all of Aristotle’s achievements followed. When Aristotle’s finished his work, he returned to Athens.

Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle who held his writings, took over for Aristotle in the leadership of the Peripatetic School. These writings were passed on from teacher to student many times. One of the pupils maintained his journals in a vault to keep them safe from thieves, however, the journals, overtime, were ruined by water, worms and moths. The work done by Aristotle was put into several categories: The first were dialogues and several works of a popular character. Another was the collection of facts and material from scientific behavior. Lastly, were the systematic works. Aristotle’s detailed systematic treatments were organized into many divisions: logic, physical,philosophical and psychological works, and works on natural history. Each division was divided into parts. Logic was further split into: topics, categories, sophistical refutations, interpretation, prior analytics, and posterior analytics. The works on natural history were based on history of animals, including the parts, movement, progression, generation, minor treatises, and problems. Physical works were split into: the heavens, generation, physics, and meteorologics. Psychological works were based on the soul and memory, dreams, reminiscence, and prophesying. Philosophical works were based on moralia, politics, rhetoric, metaphysics, eudemain ethics, nicomachean ethics, magna and poetics.

Aristotle’s usually focused on the subject of logic in his writings where he came to the conclusion that all learning was based on such logic. Aristotle formalized and advanced dialectic with his discovery of syllogism. Aristotle stated that syllogism indicated that "when certain things are stated, it can be shown that something other than what is stated does not necessarily follow." Paul Strathern gives an example of two statements "All Greeks are human. All humans are mortal. It can be assumed that: All Greeks are mortal." Aristotle called his logic "analytika", which means unraveling and applied the term "logic" as a comparable to verbal reasoning. Aristotle also classified individual words into categories such as: situation, quantity, condition, quality, substance, relation, place, time, action, and passion, which were then set in an organized order of questions we would ask regarding an object.

A group of Aristotle’s works were called "metaphysics". They originally started as physics, but Andronicus labeled them "after physics," which is "metaphysics" in ancient Greek. Some of the works in this section consisted of his treatises on ontology, which is the nature and relations of being, and the ultimate nature of things. There are many causes of actual versus the potential state of things. They are: the material cause, or the rudiments of which an object is created; the efficient cause, or the method by which an object is created; the formal cause, or the manifestation of what the object is; and the final cause, or the end for which the object is created.

Aristotle views the world as the scale or balance between two extremes: form without matter is positioned on one end, and matter without form is positioned on the other end. Everything in the world has an end and a function, and nothing is without its purpose. Motion, the migration of matter into form, has four types: motion which influences the substance of a thing, especially its beginning and its ending; motion which could result in alterations in quality; motion that may result in changes in quantity, by increasing and decreasing it; and motion that brings about locomotion, or change of place. Of those four types, motion which could result in alterations in quantity is considered the most important.

Aristotle characterizes the soul as "the perfect expression or realization of a natural body" and with this characterization, it stands to reason that this is a close relationship among psychological states and physiological processes. The object of the senses may be unique, common, or incidental or inferential. He further classifies imagination as "the movement which results upon an actual sensation." This suggests that the basis of memory is the means how an impression of the senses is portrayed and retained before the mind. .

In conclusion, Aristotle is certainly the greatest polymaths of all times in my opinion. He created the basis of our idea of objects and how we think about everything. Aristotle enabled our understanding of the universe to expand and explain how we figure out everything. He made everything we do a science. He defined motion and how it works all the way to what the meaning of soul is. Therefore, Aristotle was a huge part of what we call today, mathematics.

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