Images Videos Ptolemy, coloured woodcut, 1531. Map of Great Britain and Ireland derived from Ptolemy’s Geographia, woodcut, 1482. It was included in a volume of Ptolemy’s maps that was the first to be printed outside Italy and the first to use woodcuts. World map derived from Ptolemy’s Geographia, woodcut, 1482. It was included in a volume of Ptolemy’s maps that was the first to be printed outside Italy and the first to use woodcuts. Frontispiece to Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (1632; Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican). From left to right are Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus. Ptolemy holds an astrolabe, Copernicus a model of a planet orbiting the Sun. Ptolemy and Regiomontanus shown on the frontispiece to Regiomontanus’s Epitome of the Almagest, 1496. The Epitome was one of the most important Renaissance sources on ancient astronomy. Mathematicians of the Greco-Roman worldThis map spans a millennium of prominent Greco-Roman mathematicians, from Thales of Miletus (c. 600 bc) to Hypatia of Alexandria (c. ad 400). Their names—located on the map under their cities of birth—can be clicked to access their biographies. Ptolemy’s map of the world, as printed at Ulm, Ger., 1482. Ptolemy’s theory of the solar system. Learn which gods were worshipped at Dion. Discussion of four attempts to explain the structure of the solar system, from Aristotle to Johannes Kepler.