Ptolemy

PTOLEMY (Roman Greco-Egyptian, c. 100-170 CE)

Ptolemy (called Claudius Ptolemy to distinguish him from members of the Greco-Egyptian ruling dynasty that ended with Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE) was a Greco-Egyptian Roman citizen and a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist. He wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science: the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest; the Geography, a discussion on the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world; and the astrological treatise attempting to adapt astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day known as the Tetrábiblos or "Four Books." Ptolemy's writings were copied and commented upon throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

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Nicomachus of Gerasa

NICHOMACHUS OF GERASA (Greco-Roman, c. 60-120 CE)

The medieval school curriculum, called "the seven liberal arts," was divided into two parts: the lower division was called the "trivium" (grammar, logic, and rhetoric); the upper was the "quadrivium" consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). This division indicates that math, music, and the celestial motions were considered of a piece, and it seems one expert on these was the Greco-Roman scholar Nicomachus of Gerasa (in northern Jordan). He wrote an Introduction to Arithmetic and a Manual of Harmonics in Greek; as a Neopythagorean he also wrote about the mystical properties of numbers. Little else is known about him, but it is believed that he wrote the Manual at the request of a lady of noble birth, to whom it is addressed. This suggests he was a respected scholar of some status.

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