Saturday, March 10, 2012

PTOLEMY

For all you "everybody thought the Earth was flat prior to Columbus," people.

“The earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point.”

Ptolemy,  The Almagest  circa. 150 ad

1 comment:

Eric said...

And Eratosthenes (276 BC– 195 BC) made a halfway decent measurement of the circumference (see Wikpedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geodesy).