What is "plato"

Plato (; Greek: Plátōn, in Classical Attic; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, especially the Western tradition. Unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries, Plato's entire œuvre is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years.

Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato laid the very foundations of Western philosophy and science. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." In addition to being a foundational figure for Western science, philosophy, and mathematics, Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality,. Friedrich Nietzsche, amongst other scholars, called Christianity, "Platonism for the people." Plato's influence on Christian thought is often thought to be mediated by his major influence on Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the most important philosophers and theologians in the history of Christianity.

Plato was the innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy, which originate with him. Plato appears to have been the founder of Western political philosophy, with his Republic, and Laws among other dialogues, providing some of the earliest extant treatments of political questions from a philosophical perspective. Plato's own most decisive philosophical influences are usually thought to have been Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Pythagoras, although few of his predecessors' works remain extant and much of what we know about these figures today derives from Plato himself.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Plato as "...one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. ... He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank."

Plato is the lava-filled remains of a lunar impact crater on the Moon. It is located on the northeastern shore of the Mare Imbrium, at the western extremity of the Montes Alpes mountain range. In the mare to the south are several rises collectively named the Montes Teneriffe. To the north lies the wide stretch of the Mare Frigoris. East of the crater, among the Montes Alpes, are several rilles collectively named the Rimae Plato.

The age of Plato is about 3.84 billion years, only slightly younger than the Mare Imbrium to the south. The rim is irregular with 2-km-tall jagged peaks that project prominent shadows across the crater floor when the Sun is at a low angle. Sections of the inner wall display signs of past slumping, most notably a large triangular slide along the western side. The rim of Plato is circular, but from the Earth it appears oval due to foreshortening.

The flat floor of Plato has a relatively low albedo, making it appear dark in comparison to the surrounding rugged terrain. The floor is free of significant impact craters and lacks a central peak. However, there are a few small craterlets scattered across the floor.

Plato has developed a reputation for transient lunar phenomena, including flashes of light, unusual colour patterns, and areas of hazy visibility. These anomalies are likely a result of seeing conditions, combined with the effects of different illumination angles of the Sun.

The 17th-century astronomer Hevelius called this feature the 'Greater Black Lake'.

Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BCE) was a Greek philosopher.

Plato may also refer to:

Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is a space observatory under development by the European Space Agency for launch around 2024. PLATO will use a group of photometers to search for planet transits, to discover and characterize rocky extrasolar planets of all sizes around red dwarf stars, yellow dwarf stars like our Sun, and subgiant stars where water can exist in liquid state. A secondary objective is to study stellar oscillations to measure stellar masses and evolution.

PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games.

PLATO was designed and built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary through university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. Courses were taught in a range of subjects, including Latin, chemistry, education and primary mathematics. The system included a number of features which were useful for pedagogy, including text overlaying graphics, contextual assessment of free text answers, depending on the inclusion of keywords, and feedback designed to respond to alternative answers.

Rights to market PLATO as a commercial product were licensed by Control Data Corporation (CDC), the manufacturer on whose mainframe computers the PLATO IV system was built. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world, but found marketing the system was not as easy as hoped. PLATO nevertheless built a strong following in certain markets, and the last production PLATO system did not shut down until 2006, coincidentally just a month after Norris died.

PLATO (Package for Linear-combination of ATomic Orbitals) is a suite of programs for electronic structure calculations originally designed and written by Andrew Horsfield and Steven Kenny, but now with contributions from others. It receives its name from the choice of basis set (numeric atomic orbitals) used to expand the electronic wavefunctions.

PLATO is a code, written in C, for the efficient modelling of materials. It is primarily a tight binding code (both orthogonal and non-orthogonal, allowing for monopole charges and electron spin), but also performs calculations using density functional theory (both in the local-density approximation and the generalized gradient approximation). The program can be applied to systems with periodic boundary conditions in three dimension ( crystals) and those with none ( molecules).

Plato (also Plato Comicus; Ancient Greek: Πλάτων Κωμικός) was an Athenian comic poet and contemporary of Aristophanes. None of his plays survive intact, but the titles of thirty of them are known, including a Hyperbolus (c. 420-416 BC), Victories (after 421), Cleophon (in 405), and Phaon (probably in 391). The titles suggest that his themes were often political. In 410 BC, one of his plays took first prize at the City Dionysia.

Phaon included a scene (quoted in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus) in which a character sits down to study a poem about gastronomy (in fact mostly about aphrodisiacs) and reads some of it aloud. The poem is in hexameters, and therefore sounds like a lampoon of the work of Archestratus, although the speaker calls it "a book by Philoxenus", meaning either the poet Philoxenus of Cythera, the glutton Philoxenus of Leucas, or both indiscriminately.

Plato (, ) was the Exarch of Ravenna from 645 to 649. He is known primarily for his monothelitism and his opposition to the Pope Theodore I. He convinced the Patriarch Paul II of Constantinople to break with the Pope.

He is first attested as exarch in 645. By 649, when his successor Olympius is named as being at Ravenna, he was already back at the imperial court in Constantinople, functioning as the advisor of Emperor Constans II on the Italian situation regarding Pope Martin I's resistance to Monotheletism.

He is last attested in 653. A brother, the presbyter Theocharistos, and a brother-in-law or son-in-law named Theodore Chilas, are also attested two years later.