PTOLEMY

Born: 100 CE - Hermiou Egypt

Died about AD 165 - Alexandria, Egypt

Claudius Ptolemy was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music

theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to
later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science and the most influential of Greek
astronomers and geographers of his time. His name, Claudius Ptolemy, is of course a mixture of
the Greek Egyptian 'Ptolemy' and the Roman 'Claudius'. This would indicate that he was
descended from a Greek family living in Egypt and that he was a citizen of Rome, which would
be as a result of a Roman emperor giving that 'reward' to one of Ptolemy's ancestors.

Achievements

Ptolemy propounded the geocentric theory of the solar system that prevailed for 1400 years. In
several fields his writings represent the culminating achievement of Greco-Roman science,
particularly his geocentric (Earth-centered) model of the universe now known as the Ptolemaic
system. His first major astronomical work, the Almagest, was completed about 150 CE and
contains reports of astronomical observations that Ptolemy had made over the preceding
quarter of a century. The size and content of his subsequent literary production suggests that
he lived until about 170 CE.0020 He made astronomical observations from Alexandria in Egypt
during the years AD 127-41.

Ptolemy devised new geometrical proofs and theorems. He obtained, using chords of a circle
and an inscribed 360-gon, the approximation. He found the lengths of the seasons and, based
on these, he proposed a simple model for the sun which was a circular motion of uniform
angular velocity, but the earth was not at the center of the circle but at a distance called the
eccentricity from this center. This theory of the sun forms the subject of Book 3 of the
Almagest.

Ptolemy found the lengths of the seasons and, based on these, he proposed a simple model for
the sun which was a circular motion of uniform angular velocity, but the earth was not at the
center of the circle but at a distance called the eccentricity from this center. This theory of the
sun forms the subject of Book 3 of the Almagest.