Ptolemy rightly identified the town as the gateway to Seres, the Land of Silk.
Claudius Ptolemy and Galen, respectively an astronomer and a physician, and Plotinus and Philo, who were both philosophers.
Ptolemy could not resist filling blanks on his maps with theoretical conceptions, something that plagues exploration to this day.
WSJ: Lost in Our Maps: A History of Cartographic Catastrophes
But Ptolemy was prone to the biggest and most contagious cartographic vice: Lacking precise information, he just made things up.
WSJ: Lost in Our Maps: A History of Cartographic Catastrophes
Since the era of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, advances in science and mathematics have required data in excess of our ability to compute it readily.
Only 700 years ago, Europe's knowledge of the planet extended no farther than Ptolemy's in Roman times: just into northern Africa and western Asia.
ECONOMIST: Modern man knows where he stands. His map tells him
As one would expect, Ptolemy still held a skewed vision of the world, with distortions of Africa and India, and the Mediterranean much too wide.
WSJ: Lost in Our Maps: A History of Cartographic Catastrophes
But Ptolemy was at least attempting to map on scientific principles.
WSJ: Lost in Our Maps: A History of Cartographic Catastrophes
Cosmography is a term also associated with the Flemish cartographer, Mercator, who published his own atlas that included corrected versions of the maps first produced by Ptolemy.
As far back as 261BC, Ptolemy I started building the Pharos of Alexandria, standing over 400 feet tall with an open bonfire that could be seen 29 nautical miles away.
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Natural philosophy, based largely on the works of Greek and Roman thinkers like Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Archimedes and many others, therefore became a major part of the syllabuses of Medieval universities.
The story, narrated by the aged Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) and unfolding in flashback, takes us from a princely boyhood in Macedonia, under the raging rule of Val Kilmer, to the rout of Darius at Gaugamela in 331 B.
Mr. Knecht breaks up the story of Lucky Linda's construction by salting in some rather fun history of yachting though the ages, beginning with Pharaoh Ptolemy IV, who ruled Egypt 200 years before Christ and built a 400-foot vessel powered by several hundred oarsmen.
Fox tackles the origins of the current thinking on the beginning of the universe starting way, way back with Plato, and moving her way through Ptolemy, the astronomical duo of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler (did you know that Brahe had his own castle for studying astronomy?), Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and the current state of the Big Bang, String Theory, and alternative theories for the origins of the universe.
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