Claudius Ptolemy's Accomplishments

Claudius Ptolemy was a person well known for his work in fields such as astrology, geography, math, and astrology. He mainly lived in Alexandria, Egypt for most of his life. Some of his bigger works include his Ptolemaic Model of the solar system, the Geographia and the Almagest, and some theorems in math and physics. Mainly Ptolemy created a lot of resources for others to use in their studies. Along with the sciences he was also interested in the arts, working a little bit in music and poetry. Since Ptolemy lived so long ago not very much is known about his life besides his surviving works. He was born sometime around 100 AD and died in 170 AD, living surprisingly long considering the average lifespan of a person of that time. He live in

Ptolemy explains how he assigned coordinates to the geographical locations he knew on a grid that covered the entire Earth. A world map from it covered as far east as China and as far west as the countries on the east side of the Atlantic ocean, also including a fair bit of Africa down south. Besides the lack of knowledge of the countries beyond the map and the misinformation of the size of the Indian island Sri Lanka, he was only off by fourteen degrees, and even accepted this and that the way he determined longitude was faulty. Ptolemy’s work in astrology is also legendary. He wrote was was considered an astrological bible called the Tetrabiblos in Greek. It’s not know for certain but the general thought is that Ptolemy’s own name for the work was Apotelesmatika, which means something like “Astronomical Outcomes.” Much of the work included in this is not Ptolemy's but again an organized collection of information from those before him. Ptolemy had a rational view of astrology in that it was conjecture and that it wasn’t this vital component of a person’s life as many people in royalty seemed to think it was at that