Timaeus (fifth century bc) was a Pythagorean philosopher from Locri, in Magna Graecia, now southern Italy. He was also a mathematician and astronomer. Plato studied with him while he was visiting ...

Late one summer morning in 1919, a young student at the University of Munich sat on the roof of its Training College with a copy of Plato’s Timaeus. The short but bloody reign of the Bavarian ...