HackingTheUniverse

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al-Battani (Abu Abdallah Mohammad ibn Jabir Al-Battani) was born around 850 in Turkey (then Mesopotamia) and was a mathematician and astronomer. He advanced the accuracy of astronomical observations beyond that established in Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, including the motion of five planets and the length of our solar year. He catalogued 489 stars. He pioneered the use [...]

Francoise Arago was born in 1786 in France and was an astronomer, physicist and mathematician. Some of his work complemented similar work by Faraday and Fresnel. His confirmation of a bright spot of light at the center of a circular shadow helped confirm Fresnel’s wave theory of light and is now known as “Arago’s spot”. [...]

It is possible (but not yet confirmed) that astronomers have observed a collision in the asteroid belt for the first time. Mystery Object Behaves Both Like a Comet and Asteroid – [discovery.com] Something awfully curious is happening 250 million miles away in the asteroid belt. Astronomers think they may be witnessing a never-before-seen collision between [...]

Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 in Sweden. He was an astronomer and alchemist who is known for his contributions to astronomy. While he was probably the last astronomer to work mostly without a telescope, he revolutionized the use of precise instrumentation in astronomy. Because of this precision, he was able to discover and document [...]

Omar Khayyam was born in Persia in 1048 and was a mathematician, astronomer and poet. He was known for using a geometric approach to analyzing algebra problems and for solving cubic equations using line segments. He noted that solving the cubic required the use of conic sections and could not be solved simply with a [...]

Born in Damascus, Syria in 1521, Taqi al-Din was an all around scientist, exelling at astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine, botany, and a wide variety of engineering applications. He was also a judge and religious philospher. He described a steam turbine engine in a book called, “The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines” in 1551. He invented [...]

Hypatia was a Greek female mathematician, philosopher and astronomer, born around 370 in Alexandria, Egypt. She studied the works of Plato and Aristotle. Her father, Theon was a mathematician and philosopher at the University of Alexandria. She edited some of her fathers work and wrote commentaries on other works of the time, such as Euclid [...]

Claudius Ptolemaeus was born in Egypt around 85 as a Roman citizen. He was a mathematician, astronomer and geographer. He is famous for a series of books: Harmonics – on musical theory Optics – properties of light, including reflection, refraction and color Geography – used a coordinate grid system Tetrabiblos (four books) – on astrology [...]

Born in 1571 in the Stuttgart region of Germany, Johannes Kepler was a mathematician and astronomer. Kepler became the first published defender of the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. He described planetary orbits as platonic solids and then realized that the orbits are eliptical. Kepler studied the golden ration and wrote this about it: “Geometry has [...]

A circular arrangement of large stones on Salisbury plain in Wiltshire county, England, Stonehenge was probably set up as a burial site and point for rituals of healing and worship. It was erected in stages over a period of at least one thousand years. Stonehenge, England Laugh not so lightly, King, for not lightly are [...]