Zeno of Elea c.490-c.420BC
Greek philosopher and mathematician

He was a native of Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, where he lived all or most of his life, and was a disciple of Parmenides of Elea. In defence of his monistic philosophy against the Pythagoreans he devised his famous paradoxes which purported to show the impossibility of motion and of spatial division, by showing that space and time could be neither continuous nor discrete. The paradoxes are: 'Achilles and the Tortoise', 'The Flying Arrow', 'The Stadium' and 'The Moving Rows'. Aristotle attempted a refutation but they were revived as raising serious philosophical issues by Lewis Carroll and by Bertrand Russell.