A Dorian Greek city on the southwest coast of Asia Minor, renowned for its medical school and as the home of Eudoxus—the brilliant mathematician and astronomer who modeled the heavens with concentric spheres.
Cnidus through the eras
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Classical Age
A Dorian city on a peninsula of Caria, Cnidus was famed for its physicians—a medical tradition rivaling that of nearby Kos—and for its native son Eudoxus (c. 408–355 BCE). A mathematician of the first rank, Eudoxus developed the theory of proportion later preserved in Euclid and the 'method of exhaustion' that anticipated integral calculus, and he devised an ingenious system of nested concentric spheres to explain the motions of the planets, the most sophisticated astronomical model of his day. He moved in Plato's circle at Athens even as he founded a school of his own.
Hellenistic Age
Under the Hellenistic kingdoms Cnidus prospered as a center of art and science: it commissioned Praxiteles' celebrated nude Aphrodite, the most admired statue of antiquity, while others carried on its learned traditions. Its great pharos-like monument and the observatory associated with Eudoxus' followers kept the city's scientific reputation alive.