Archytas of Tarentum

Archytas was a Greek philosopher, mathematician, statesman, and general of the early 4th century BCE, based in the Greek colony of Tarentum in southern Italy. A leading figure of the later Pythagorean tradition and a friend of Plato, he made notable contributions to mathematics, especially the theory of proportions and a famous solution to the problem of doubling the cube, and he is sometimes called a founder of mathematical mechanics. Much about his life survives only in later reports.