The Genius of Ptolemy: How a Lost Ancient Greek Treatise Mapped the Universe

The Genius of Ptolemy: How a Lost Ancient Greek Treatise Mapped the Universe

Claudius Ptolemy Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain In the second century AD, the Greek polymath from Alexandria Claudius Ptolemy achieved the seemingly impossible: he captured the infinite expanse of the universe on a flat surface. This sounds utterly bizarre, especially for this time in human history, but things are not as easy as they seem. His groundbreaking work, the Planisphaerium, which translates from Greek and Latin as “flat sphe…