Eratosthenes of Cyrene

Eratosthenes of Cyrene

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276 BC – 195/194 BC) was a Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His work is comparable to what is now known as the study of geography, and he introduced some of the terminology still used today.

However the most famous achievement of Eratosthenes in the field of geography was the method he invented to measure the size of the Earth. The method was based on the simultaneous measurement of the Sun height in Syene (in the south of Egypt) and in Alexandria, lying approximately on the same meridian, at the moment of the summer solstice. Given an estimate of the distance between the two cities, he was able to calculate the circumference of Earth, obtaining 250000 stadia.

Citing wikipedia.org
britannica.com


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