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Eratosthenes: Geography
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Although Eratosthenes was a brilliant scientist, he lived at a time of many notable Grecian scholars, including his good friend Archimedes, who was one of the greatest mathematicians in history. As a result, Eratosthenes earned the nickname Beta, the second letter in the Greek alphabet, from some of his envious contemporaries who claimed that he was second best among his peers in everything. But history shows that he was a leader in numerous fields including astronomy, geography, literature, poetry, philosophy, and mathematics. Even if he was only second best at so many things, in an era of amazing progress in the sciences and arts, Eratosthenes is clearly among the foremost geniuses of all time.
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Eratosthenes wrote works of literary criticism (On Ancient Comedy), philosophy, history (establishing chronology as a scientific discipline), mathematics, astronomy, and geography. He ... wrote a short epic dealing with the death of Hesiod, and Erigone, an elegy praised by Longinus. His Geographica comprises a history of geographical ideas, including a section on mathematical geography in which the division of the globe into zones was established and the inhabited portions were delimited. There were also some crude map-making attempts in his memoirs, and it is believed that Eratosthenes compiled a catalog of 675 stars.
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The final chapter discusses the significance of Eratosthenes for ancient intellectual history. Geus asks about the cultural exchange between Greece and Egypt and summarizes that very little Egyptian influence on Eratosthenes can be ascertained and that he surely was no focal point in the process of assimilation between Egyptian and Greek culture. Eratosthenes cannot be tied to a philosophical school, but certainly he was most interested in Platonic thought. He had a high reputation as a mathematician, though he apparently was better in applied than in pure mathematics. Generally, one gets the impression that his strength lay in systematizing and historicizing a number of fields such as chronography, grammar, geography and astronomy. Geus sees the intellectual development of Eratosthenes as a continuous advance from the poet and philosopher admiring Plato to the mathematical astronomer and geographer to finally the philologist using historical methods.
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