Hipparchus father of trigonometry
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The Greek Orthodox St Catherine Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula has uncovered part of the long-lost star catalogue – believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky – of the Ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who is also considered the founder of trigonometry.
Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries, Nature published.
James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts.
It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.
The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or
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Hipparchus
2nd-century BC Greek astronomer, geographer and mathematician
This article is about the Greek astronomer. For other uses, see Hipparchus (disambiguation).
Hipparchus (; Greek: Ἵππαρχος, Hípparkhos; c. 190 – c. 120 BC) was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry,[1] but is most famous for his incidental discovery of the precession of the equinoxes.[2] Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia, and probably died on the island of Rhodes, Greece. He is known to have been a working astronomer between 162 and 127 BC.[3]
Hipparchus is considered the greatest ancient astronomical observer and, by some, the greatest overall astronomer of antiquity.[4][5] He was the first whose quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the Sun and Moon survive. For this he certainly made use of the observations and perhaps the mathematical techniques accumulated over centuries by the Babylonians and by Meton of Athens (fifth century BC), Timocharis,
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