Ptolemy as imagined in André Thévet's Vrais pourtraits (1584). Source · Public domain
About Claudius Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy (fl. c. AD 127–170) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer who worked at Alexandria in Roman Egypt; almost nothing is known of his life beyond his writings, which record observations from AD 127 to 141. Besides the Almagest he wrote the Handy Tables, the Planetary Hypotheses, the Tetrabiblos on astrology, the Geography, the Optics and the Harmonics. His astronomy became the standard of the Greek, Islamic and Latin worlds for some fourteen centuries.
The Almagest is Ptolemy's complete mathematical account of the motions of the Sun, Moon, planets and fixed stars, written in Greek at Alexandria about AD 150 under the title Mathematike Syntaxis (Mathematical Compilation). Its familiar name comes from the Arabic al-majisti, from a Greek word meaning the greatest.
