Autolycus pronunciation
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Autolycus of Pitane
4th-century BC Ancient Greek astromer, mathematician and geographer
Autolycus of Pitane (Greek: Αὐτόλυκος ὁ Πιταναῖος; c. 360 – c. 290 BC) was a Greekastronomer, mathematician, and geographer. He is known today for his two surviving works On the Moving Sphere and On Risings and Settings, both about spherical geometry.
Life
Autolycus was born in Pitane, a town of Aeolis within Ionia, Asia Minor. Of his personal life nothing is known, although he was a contemporary of Aristotle and his works seem to have been completed in Athens between 335–300 BC. Euclid references some of Autolycus' work, and Autolycus is known to have taught Arcesilaus.[citation needed]
The lunar craterAutolycus was named in his honour.
Work
Autolycus' two surviving works are about spherical geometry with application to astronomy: On the Moving Sphere and On Risings and Settings (of stars). In late antiquity, both were part of the "Little Astronomy",[1] a collection of miscellaneous short works about geometry and astronomy which were
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Autolycus of Pitane
MATHEMATICIAN
360 BC - 290 BC
Autolycus of Pitane
Autolycus of Pitane (Greek: Αὐτόλυκος ὁ Πιταναῖος; c. 360 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer. Read more on Wikipedia
Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Autolycus of Pitane has received more than 76,520 page views. His biography is available in 28 different languages on Wikipedia. Autolycus of Pitane is the 214th most popular mathematician (down from 206th in 2019), the 383rd most popular biography from Türkiye (up from 457th in 2019) and the 7th most popular Turkish Mathematician.
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Among MATHEMATICIANS
Among mathematicians, Autolycus of Pitane ranks 214 out of 1,004. Before him are Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, Victor D'Hondt, Constantin Carathéodory, Hermann Schwarz, Étienne-Louis Malus, and Antoine Augustin Cournot. After him are Willem de Sitt
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Autolycus of Pitane
(fl. ca. 300 b.c.)
astronomy, geometry.
Autolycus came from Pitane in the Aeolis, Asia Minor, and was an instructor of Arcesilaus, also of Pitane, who founded the so-called Middle Academy. It is reported by Diogenes Laertius (4.29) that Arcesilaus accompanied his master on a journey to Sardis.
Autolycus was a successor to Eudoxus in the study of spherical astronomy, but was active somewhat later than the successors of the Cnidian, Callippus, and Polemarchus. It appears that he attempted to defend the Eudoxian system of concentric rotating spheres against critics, notably Aristotherus, the teacher of the astronomer-poet Aratus. The critics had pointed out that Venus and Mars seem brighter in the course of their retrograde arcs and that eclipses of the sun are sometimes annular and sometimes total, so that not all heavenly bodies remain at fixed distances from the earth. Autolycus acknowledged the difficulty in his discussion with Aristotherus and, inevitably, was unable to account for the variations by means of the Eudoxian system.
The two treatises of
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