Geography edit down to 500 words - Essay Example

Pythagoras asserted our planet, as part of a well-organized cosmos, has a spherical form. Plato represented a return to Pythagorus after the theories of Heraclites and Aristarchus were rejected, and Aristotle agreed with Plato’s model, with the correction that everything is material, consisting of mixtures of four elements. Strabo is most known for his Geographika, the first real encyclopedia of the ancient world while Claudius Ptolemy expanded Pythagorus’ ideas by theorizing the outer sphere rotates around the Earth each 24 hours and is approximately 10,000 Earth diameters from the centre.

These early models and methods of thinking influenced the works of Ibn Haukal and Al-Biruni. Ibn Haukal traveled in Asia and Africa for 30 years and wrote “The Description of the Earth” describing people living in Spain, Italy and in the “Lands of the Romans” (Byzantine Empire). Al-Biruni calculated the latitude of Kath, Khwarazm, using the altitude of the Sun and wrote several books on geography, such as Cartography, where he explained the methodology of projecting a hemisphere on a plane.

He also wrote works about astrolabe, decimal system, astrology and history and had calculated the radius of the Earth to be 6,399.6 kilometers (See Biruni from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). During the medieval period (15-17th centuries), European ships traveled around the world and compounded the available maps thanks to great improvements in navigation, cartography and shipbuilding development. Many new trade routes were established, further pushing the development of natural science. The most significant travelers and explorers of this period are Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, John Cabot, Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand Magellan (See Age of Discovery from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

As the son of Portuguese King John I, Henry the Navigator was able to gather together navigators,