Claudius Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy lived and worked in Alexandria, Egypt, under Roman rule, in the second century AD. Almost nothing is known of his life beyond his books, which date his observations between AD 127 and 141. His great work on astronomy, called the Almagest from its Arabic title, gathered centuries of Greek astronomy into a complete mathematical system. It placed the Earth motionless at the center of the universe, with the Moon, Sun, planets and stars moving around it, and used circles upon circles, called epicycles, to predict the positions of the planets accurately. It also included a catalogue of over a thousand stars. His Geography explained how to draw maps using latitude and longitude and listed the coordinates of about eight thousand places in the known world. He also wrote on optics, music theory and astrology. His works were translated into Arabic and later Latin, and his system of the heavens remained the standard view in Europe and the Islamic world until Copernicus proposed a Sun-centered alternative in 1543.

Claudius Ptolemy is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia