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Geography people
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Immanuel Kent | German philosopher who compared geography and history |
Thales of Miletus | applied principles of geometry to measuring land area |
Anaximander | a student of Thales who made a world map based on information from sailors and argued that the world was shaped like a cylinder |
Pythagoras | may have been the first to propose a spherical world, arguing that the sphere was the most perfect form |
Hecataeus | may have produced the first geography book, called Periodos Ges (“Journey Around the Earth”) |
Aristotle | was the first to demonstrate that Earth was spherical on the basis of evidence |
Eratosthenes | invented the word geography, accepted that Earth was round, calculated its circumference within 0.5% accuracy, divided Earth into 5 climatic regions, described the world in one of the first geography books |
Strabo | described the known world in a 17-volume work titled Geographica (“Geography”) |
Ptolemy | wrote an eight-volume Geographia, codified basic principles of mapmaking, and prepared numerous maps that were not improved upon for more than 1,000 years |
Yu Gong | (“Tribute of Yu”), written by an unknown author in 5 BC, described the economic resources of the country’s different provinces; it was a chapter in a book called Shujing (“Book of Documents”), considered one of five classics of ancient Chinese literature |
Pei Xiu | the “father of Chinese cartography,” who produced an elaborate map of the country in 267 C.E. |
Muhammad al-Idrisi | an Arab geographer whose extensive travels through Southwest Asia & North Africa informed his creation of a world map and geography text in 1154, building on Ptolemy’s long-neglected work |
Ibn Battuta | a Moroccan scholar who wrote Rihla (“Travels”) based on three decades of journeys covering more than 120,000 kilometers (75,000 miles) through northern Africa, southern Europe, and much of Asia |
Martin Waldseemüller | a German cartographer who was credited with producing the first map to use the label “America”; he wrote on the map (translated from Latin) “from Amerigo the discoverer . . . as if it were the land of Americus, thus America” |
Abraham Ortelius | a Flemish cartographer, who created the first modern atlas and was the first to hypothesize that the continents were once joined together before drifting apart |
Bernhardus Varenius | who produced Geographia Generalis, which stood for more than a century as the standard treatise on systematic geography |