I would start by asking a question. Are all the most famous philosophers and mathematicians from Greece because they made the largest contributions to mathematics and philosophy or are their names given such precedence because of how later generations came to see them as important historical figures, outside of their actual contributions?

I will argue that it's largely the second.

Perhaps if you think of philosophers you think of Plato or Aristotle and for mathematics, Pythagorus. But what even is Aristotelian philosophy? Is it still dominant today? How important are the principles of pythagorean theory to mathematics today? Obviously they are important in the development of these fields but I wouldn't say they are the most important. I would argue that there are much more recent philosophers who have had a large impact (even something as simple as Marxism or Immanuel Kant and how his work influenced the development of the scientific method) as well as non-Western philosophers. In mathematics, this goes even further. Linear algebra and mathematical modelling have massive impacts on science and technology today and are not the work of any greek scholar. Instead they are the work of many scholars of 17-20th C and also have some roots in China. But this is all more about our contemporary society than anything else.

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So if we don't know these names so well because of their immense relevance to today's world, why do we know them? Why are we taught them? These names were transmitted to us in the present day via a circuitous route. You may guess that it's because the Roman Empire inherited the Greek Empire and then it came from there to us. But it's not the case. In fact almost all our knowledge of these works comes from Arabic.

This may seem strange but ask yourself how many Classical texts we have from the Classical Era or from the Biblical Era. Think the Dead Sea Scrolls, they're unusual because of how old they are because most things from those time periods don't survive or at most we have a couple of fragments. So how do we still have so many works from the classical era. The answer is copies. In the past, before the printing press, if someone wanted another copy of a text, they had to write it by hand and so a new copy was made. In this way, knowledge was transmitted (as well as orally, of course). So these works are being copied over and over, often being translated into a series of different languages as time passes. So from Greek to Arabic to Latin to English maybe!

Let's explain with a concrete example. Euclid's Elements is an immensely important work of mathematics. It was originally a Greek work and it contained many different mathematical definitions, proofs, etc include much of what we think of as Pythagorean mathematics.