Claudius Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and geographer who lived and worked in and around Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt in the second century CE. His astronomical treatise, later known by its Arabic derived title the Almagest, is the only surviving comprehensive treatise on astronomy from antiquity and presented the only mathematically sound geocentric model of the solar system produced by ancient science, a model that dominated Western and Islamic astronomy for more than a thousand years. His Geography provided methods for drawing maps using geographical coordinates and compiled a database of roughly eight thousand places known in the Roman world at the time. His astrological work, the Tetrabiblos, held an authority among later astrological writers that has been compared to that of a foundational text. Ptolemy geocentric model was later promoted by the Catholic Church and remained the dominant framework in astronomy until it was displaced by the heliocentric models of the Scientific Revolution.