De magnitudinibus et distantiis solis et lunae
Samos
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Aristarchus of Samos
Aristarchus of Samos
c. 310 BCE–c. 230 BCE · Samos
Aristarchus of Samos was a Greek astronomer and mathematician of the 3rd century BCE. He is celebrated for proposing that the Sun, not the Earth, lies at the center, with the Earth and planets revolving around it, an early heliocentric hypothesis reported by later writers. His one surviving treatise estimates the relative sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon using geometry.
Did you know?
The sun-centered universe was proposed about 1,800 years before Copernicus
Aristarchus of Samos argued that the Earth revolves around the Sun and spins on its own axis — a heliocentric model that predates Copernicus's 1543 book by roughly eighteen centuries. Copernicus even named Aristarchus in an early draft, then cut the reference before publication.
How we know
Aristarchus of Samos c. 310–230 BCE; heliocentric hypothesis c. 270 BCE (preserved in Archimedes' Sand Reckoner); Copernicus, De revolutionibus, 1543 CE — about 1,800 years later. The Aristarchus reference survives in Copernicus's manuscript but not the printed edition.
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Samos
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About Samos
A powerful Ionian island once ruled by the tyrant Polycrates—birthplace of Pythagoras, home of the Eleatic monist Melissus, and the island whose son Aristarchus first dared to set the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the cosmos.
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Aristarchus of Samos’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aristarchus of Samos’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.