play, The Bad-Tempered Man, has survived to the present day in a near-complete form. Most of another play entitled The Girl from Samos and large portions of another five have also survived. Historiography The historian Timaeus was born in Sicily but spent most of his life in Athens. His History, though lost, is significant because of its influence on Polybius. In 38 books it covered the history of Sicily and Italy to the year 264 BC, which is where Polybius begins his work. Timaeus also wrote the Olympionikai, a valuable chronological study of the Olympic Games. Ancient biography Ancient biography, or bios, as distinct from modern biography, was a genre of Greek (and Roman) literature interested in describing the goals, achievements, failures, and character of ancient historical persons and whether or not they should be imitated. Authors of ancient bios, such as the works of Nepos and Plutarch's Parallel Lives imitated many of the same sources and techniques of the contemporary historiographies of ancient Greece, notably including the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. There were various forms of ancient biographies, including philosophical biographies that brought out the moral character of their subject (such as Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers), literary biographies which discussed the lives of orators and poets (such as Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists), school and reference biographies that offered a short sketch of someone including their ancestry, major events and accomplishments, and death, autobiographies, commentaries and memoirs where the subject presents his own life, and historical/political biography focusing on the lives of those active in the military, among other categories. Science and mathematics Eratosthenes of Alexandria ( 276 BC – 195/194 BC), wrote on astronomy and geography, but his work is known mainly from later summaries. He is credited with being the first person to measure the Earth's circumference. Much that was written by the mathematicians Euclid and Archimedes has been preserved. Euclid is known for his Elements, much of which was drawn from his predecessor Eudoxus of Cnidus. The Elements is a treatise on geometry, and it has exerted a continuing influence on mathematics. From Archimedes several treatises have come down to the present. Among them are Measurement of the Circle, in which he worked out the value of pi; The Method of Mechanical Theorems, on his work in mechanics; The Sand Reckoner; and On Floating Bodies. A manuscript of his works is currently being