Hipparchus
2nd century Greek astronomer, geographer and mathematician · Turkey · Scientists · Lived 190 BC to 120 BC · aged 70
Hipparchus is read about 343 times a day, in 77 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He stumbled onto precession - the slow wobble of Earth's axis - while mapping stars with a precision no one had managed before, and in doing so cracked open the architecture of the sky.
Also in Deutsch
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About this person
Born around 190 BC in Nicaea, Hipparchus worked as an astronomer between 162 and 127 BC, likely dying on Rhodes. He built the first quantitative models for the Sun and Moon that actually survived scrutiny, drawing on centuries of Babylonian observations and Greek predecessors like Meton and Eratosthenes. Along the way he developed trigonometry and constructed its tables, solved problems of spherical geometry, compiled the western world's first comprehensive star catalog, and possibly invented the astrolabe and armillary sphere. He measured Earth's precession, contributed an atomist theory of light, and left behind a body of work so exacting that Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre called him the "father of astronomy" in 1817. Ancient observers had watched the heavens for generations; Hipparchus made the math stick.
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