Re: Who was the first scientist?

Science (Latin scientia, from scire, "to know"), term used in its broadest meaning to denote systematized knowledge in any field, but applied usually to the organization of objectively verifiable sense experience. The pursuit of knowledge in this context is known as pure science, to distinguish it from applied science, which is the search for practical uses of scientific knowledge, and from technology, through which applications are realized. For additional information, see separate articles on most of the sciences mentioned and biographies of scientists and scholars whose names are not followed by dates.

Origins of Science
Efforts to systematize knowledge can be traced to prehistoric times, through the designs that Paleolithic people painted on the walls of caves, through numerical records that were carved in bone or stone, and through artifacts surviving from Neolithic civilizations. The oldest written records of protoscientific investigations come from Mesopotamian cultures; lists of astronomical observations, chemical substances, and disease symptoms, as well as a variety of mathematical tables, were inscribed in cuneiform characters on clay tablets. Other tablets dating from about 2000 BC show that the Babylonians had knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem, solved quadratic equations, and developed a sexagesimal system of measurement (based on the number 60) from which modern time and angle units stem.

From almost the same period, papyri documents have been discovered in the Nile Valley, containing information on the treatment of wounds and diseases, on the distribution of bread and beer, and on finding the volume of a portion of a pyramid. Some of the present-day units of length can be traced to Egyptian prototypes, and the calendar in common use today is the indirect result of pre-Hellenic astronomical observations.

Rise of Scientific Theory.
Scientific knowledge in Egypt and Mesopotamia was chiefly of a practical nature, with little rational organization. Among the first Greek scholars to seek the fundamental causes of natural phenomena was the philosopher Thales, in the 6th century BC, who introduced the concept that the earth was a flat disk floating on the universal element, water. The mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, who followed him, established a movement in which mathematics became a discipline fundamental to all scientific investigation. The Pythagorean scholars postulated a spherical earth moving in a circular orbit about a central fire. At Athens, in the 4th century BC, Ionian natural philosophy and Pythagorean mathematical science combined to produce the syntheses of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. At the Academy of Plato, deductive reasoning and mathematical representation were emphasized; at the Lyceum of Aristotle, inductive reasoning and qualitative description were stressed. The interplay between these two approaches to science has led to most subsequent advances

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