Abstract
The next giant of Greek science was Ptolemy, who lived around 150 A.D. and was famous both as a great astronomer and as the author of his Geographia. Ptolemy’s astronomical achievements are collected in his masterpiece μαθη- ματικ´η σv´υνταξις, later called μεγ´αλη σv´υνταξις,1 the great treatise. Arabic as- tronomers gave it the Arabic-Greek title al-μεγ´ιστη, and so the book became the Almagest , translated into Latin by Regiomontanus. It was the second scientific book to be printed (in 1496), after Euclid’s Elements (in 1482); see Fig. 5.1, left.
Τρε z{ ις, τρ′ια, three, .(Liddel and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford) γων′ια, corner, angle, .(Liddel and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford) “I have concentrated on trigonometry.” (Mister Bean in The Exam, 1989)
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ostermann, A., Wanner, G. (2012). Trigonometry. In: Geometry by Its History. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29163-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29163-0_5
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