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240 BCE
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. He is best known for being the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth, which he did by comparing altitudes of the mid-day sun at two places a known North-South distance apart. -
127
Claudius Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe. The word for earth in Greek is geo, so we call this idea a "geocentric" theory. -
1501
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe, created the Tyconic system which was a model of the solar system in the late 16th century. -
1543
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus came up with a radical way of looking at the Universe. His heliocentric system put the Sun (helio) at the center of our system. He was not the first to have this theory. It changed how scientists looked at the solar system. -
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer. Kepler is a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution. Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague. Johannes Kepler is now chiefly remembered for discovering the three laws of planetary motion that bear his name -
Sir Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS FRS was an English mathematician, astronomer, theologian, author and physicist who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time, and a key figure in the scientific revolution. Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that dominated scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. -
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. His discovery completely changed science for the next