Ptolemy's Almagest is one of the most influential scientific works in history. A masterpiece of technical exposition, it was the basic textbook of astronomy for more than a thousand years, and still is the main source for our knowledge of ancient astronomy. This translation, based on the standard Greek text of Heiberg, makes the work accessible to English readers in an intelligible and reliable form. It contains numerous corrections derived from medieval Arabic translations and extensive footnotes that take account of the great progress in understanding the work made in this century, due to the discovery of Babylonian records and other researches. It is designed to stand by itself as an interpretation of the original, but it will also be useful as an aid to reading the Greek text.

The Almagest is by far the greatest work in astronomy in ancient times. In a massive series of thirteen books, Ptolemy shows how every detail of the motions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars can be expressed using geometrical models that can be used to compute celestial positions with remarkable accuracy The present selection covers all the essential features of Ptolemy s treatment of the heavens, omitting only more difficult and abstruse matters such as the moon s motion and the calculation of eclipses. In the interest of conciseness, development of planetary theories is restricted to two planets, one inferior (Venus) and one superior (Mars). Ptolemy s text is accompanied by extensive notes and introductions that are aimed at making the book accessible to students encountering Ptolemy for the first time. This edition is designed to provide everything needed for a one-semester course, or it can be a component of a more general course on planetary theory or history of astronomy."

The Almagest, by the Greek astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy, is the most important surviving treatise on early mathematical astronomy, offering historians valuable insight into the astronomy and mathematics of the ancient world. Pedersen's 1974 publication, A Survey of the Almagest, is the most recent in a long tradition of companions to the Almagest. Part paraphrase and part commentary, Pedersen's work has earned the universal praise of historians and serves as the definitive introductory text for students interested in studying the Almagest. In this revised edition, Alexander Jones, a distinguished authority on the history of early astronomy, provides supplementary information and commentary to the original text to account for scholarship that has appeared since 1974. This revision also incorporates various corrections to Pedersen's original text that have been identified since its publication. This volume is intended to provide students of the history of astronomy with a self-contained introduction to the Almagest, helping them to understand and appreciate Ptolemy's great and classical work.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Ptolemy's Almagest shares with Euclid's Elements the glory of being the scientific text longest in use. From its conception in the second century up to the late Renaissance, this work determined astronomy as a science. During this time the Almagest was not only a work on astronomy; the subject was defined as what is described in the Almagest. The cautious emancipation of the late middle ages and the revolutionary creation of the new science in the 16th century are not conceivable without reference to the Almagest. This text lifted European astronomy to the high standard of knowledge on which the new science flourished. Before, the Ptolemaic models of the orbits of the sun, the moon, and the planets had been refined by Arabic astronomers. They provided the structural elements with which Copernicus and Kepler ushered in the era of modern astronomy. The Almagest survived the destruction of its epicyclic representation of the planetary orbits in the conceptual traces left behind in the theories of its successors. The clear separation of the sidereal from the tropical year, the celestial coordinate systems, the concepts of time, the forms of the constellations, and brightness classifications of celestial objects are, among many other things, still part of the astronomical canon even today.

Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Telegraph, The Times, and BBC History Magazine An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk. "Falk’s bubbling curiosity and strong sense of storytelling always swept me along. By the end, The Light Ages didn’t just broaden my conception of science; even as I scrolled away on my Kindle, it felt like I was sitting alongside Westwyk at St. Albans abbey, leafing through dusty manuscripts by candlelight." —Alex Orlando, Discover Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks. As medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky, they came to develop a vibrant scientific culture. In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on a tour of medieval science through the eyes of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. Born in a rural manor, educated in England’s grandest monastery, and then exiled to a clifftop priory, Westwyk was an intrepid crusader, inventor, and astrologer. From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk and travel with him through the length and breadth of England and beyond its shores. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy, and the Persian polymath who founded the world’s most advanced observatory. The Light Ages offers a gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world and conjures a vivid picture of medieval life as we have never seen it before. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren’t so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.

In Newton's view, Ptolemy was "the most successful fraud in the history of science". Newton shows that Ptolemy predominantly obtained the astronomical results described in his work The Almagest by computation, and not by the direct observations that Ptolemy described.

This easy-to-follow book offers a statistico-geometrical approach for dating ancient star catalogs. The authors' scientific methods reveal statistical properties of ancient catalogs and overcome the difficulties of their dating originated by the low accuracy of these catalogs. Methods are tested on reliably dated medieval star catalogs and applied to the star catalog of the Almagest. Here, the dating of Ptolemy's famous star catalog is reconsidered and recalculated using modern mathematical techniques.The text provides necessary information from astronomy and astrometry. It also covers the history of observational equipment and methods for measuring coordinates of stars. Many chapters are devoted to the Almagest, from a preliminary analysis to a global statistical processing of the catalog and its basic parts. Mathematics are simplified in this book for easy reading. This book will prove invaluable for mathematicians, astronomers, astrophysicists, specialists in natural sciences, historians interested in mathematical and statistical methods, and second-year mathematics students.Features: