[4] As a Pythagorean, Archytas believed that arithmetic (logistic), rather than geometry, provided the basis for satisfactory proofs,[5] and developed the most famous argument for the infinity of the universe in antiquity.

[6] Archytas was born in Tarentum, a Greek city in the Italian Peninsula that was part of Magna Graecia, and was the son of Hestiaeus.

[6] Politically and militarily, Archytas appears to have been the dominant figure in Tarentum in his generation, somewhat comparable to Pericles in Athens a half-century earlier.

[6] Archytas is said to be the first ancient Greek to have spoken of the sciences of arithmetic (logistic), geometry, astronomy, and harmonics as kin, which later became the medieval quadrivium.

Archytas' demonstration uses lines generated by moving figures to construct the two proportionals between magnitudes and was, according to Diogenes Laërtius, the first in which mechanical motions entered geometry.

About so improbable a story I prefer to give Favorinus' own words: "Archytas the Tarentine, being in other lines also a mechanician, made a flying dove out of wood.