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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

At Quartz [qz.com], the Eleatics are still holding forth.

Almost 2,500 years ago, the philosopher Zeno of Elea set out to challenge the way we understand the physical world through a set of brain teasers that have stuck with us for millennia. The most powerful of Zeno’s paradoxes grapple with the concept of infinity while pitting observable reality against the scientific language we use to describe that reality, suggesting that elements of the everyday, like motion and speed, are actually illusory.

Over the thousands of years it took to finally wrap our brains around his most famous paradoxes, they revealed weaknesses in the tools we use to understand the basics of space and time. More than just riddles, they have pushed mathematicians and philosophers to be more rigorous and precise in the logic we use to describe the concepts at work in the paradoxical traps Zeno so cleverly set.

As oft it is with philosophy, the mathematicians miss the point. See Sextus Empircus' Πρὸς μαθηματικούς.

BRIEF HISTORY
490 BC: Zeno is born in Elea, in what is now southern Italy.

450 BC: Zeno and his mentor Parmenides (“the father of metaphysics”) visit Athens, where they meet Socrates.

435 BC: Zeno dies, reportedly stabbed to death while biting the ear of the Elean tyrant he tried to overthrow.

Even in 435BC, philosophers were punching Nazis in the face, and biting their ears.

Original Submission