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How Did Ptolemy Map the World Without Drawing a Single Picture? - The Mathematical Framework Behind Ptolemy's Maps | Sleepy Facts About History
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When we imagine an ancient map, most of us picture a faded parchment with distorted coastlines. But Claudius Ptolemy's Geography, compiled in the second century CE in Alexandria, was not primarily a picture. It was closer to a database—a structured collection of thousands of place names, each assigned a pair of numbers, accompanied by instructions for turning those numbers into a visual representation. The work's enduring power came not from the accuracy of any single coast it described…
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