Ptolemy Essays (164 words) - Ancient Greek Mathematicians, Ptolemy

Ptolemy Ptolemy established his own latitude and longitude places in the Roman Empire. Since he was wrong by about 30 % he estimated the earth to be one third smaller than it actually is. Even though a fellow by the name of Eratosthenes had much better arithmetic than Ptolemy, 13 centuries later, Columbus sailed out and took into consideration that the world was much smaller than it actually is, thus taking into considration of Ptolemy rather than Eratosthenes. 1000 years after the Roman Emopire, development of geographic findings was quite slow. Still, they still had undiscovered lands and oceans and that sustained the attention of some scholars. The ancient Greeks had said that the Earth's equalatorial zone was so hot that human life was impossible there and the sun had scorched black the skins of people living near. But the Arabs sailed acroos the equater and proved that equatorial regions were habitable. Arab geographers made interpretations of the evolution of mountain ranges and the depositon of sediments and analized the atmospheric processes that produce particular weather patterns.