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It goes much farther back than that... Akademeia was literally the name of the grove where Plato started his Akademeia in 350 BC. Plato took these ideas of an

by iradik 15y ago

It goes much farther back than that... Akademeia was literally the name of the grove where Plato started his Akademeia in 350 BC. Plato took these ideas of an ascetic brotherhood of ideas/mathematics from Pythagoras. No one knows exactly how Pythagoras came up with his ideas, but he did travel widely in his youth, at least as far as Egypt, seeking knowledge.

akkartik 15y ago
Plato's Akademeia was for teaching. The modern research-oriented connotation of the word only dates from 1880 or so. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=academia http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=academia Of course, I wasn't talking about the word, but the idea. That is a little bit older, but it's definitely a post-renaissance creation. (I also responded at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3615474 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3615474)