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Eratosthenes: Cyrene
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Eratosthenes was nicknamed Bêta or "number two", because in no branch of science he was ever the best, although he excelled in nearly every one of them. The name may refer to the fact that he was from Cyrene, where the inhabitants prided themselves on being "number two" in every field (Synesius, Letter 148).
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Eratosthenes of Cyrene, in addition to his experience as a geographer, was ... a mathematician, poet, philosopher, historian, philologist, and chronologist. Born around 275 B.C., he studied at Plato's school in Athens and later was appointed director of the library at Alexandria.
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Eratosthenes was born in Cyrene, which is in Libya nowadays. He had a lot of famous teachers, like Lysanias of Cyrene (a scholar), Ariston of Chios (a philosopher who had studied under Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy) and Callimachus (poet and scholar who was born in Cyrene). Later Eratosthenes spent some time studying in Athens.
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One of the students of the great poet Callimachus of Cyrene was Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c.275-192 BCE), who became librarian in the Museum, the scientific institute of Alexandria. He invented a new method to calculate prime numbers, drew a famous world map, catalogued several hundreds of stars, but became especially famous for his calculation of the circumference of the earth, based on the angle of the shadow that the sun made over a vertical pole at Alexandria at noon and the fact that at the same time, the sun light fell straight into a well as Syene in southern Egypt. He concluded that the circumference was 45,460 kilometers, which is pretty close to the real figure.
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