The time and place of Plato's birth are not know with certainty, but he was probably born about 428 BCE in Athens. Plato is one of the central figures in Western philosophy and science, because of his contributions in epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, and politics. Plato was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. He is the author of the Socratic dialogs and founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world
Plato has exerted a profound and enduring influence in mathematics, particularly because of his theory of forms, which assumes the existence of perfect, ideal objects of which material objects are imperfect shadows. The five Platonic solids (tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron) are named for Plato, and are the most common shapes used in dice.