Who was Plotemy?

Well do I know that I am mortal, a creature of one day.
But if my mind follows the winding paths of the stars
Then my feet no longer rest on earth, but standing by
Zeus himself I take my fill of ambrosia, the divine dish.

Above lines which appear in the Book 1 of the Almagest are accepted by many scholars to have been written by Ptolemy himself. Claudius Ptolemy was one of the most reputed mathematician, geographer, astronomer and perhaps also a poet of ancient times. He was born in Egypt around 85AD. He development trigonometry and devised many new geometrical proofs and theorems. He formulated the coordinate system of longitudes and latitudes which is immensely used in geography and astronomy.

Very little is known about Ptolemy’s life. During the years AD 127-41, he made astronomical observations from Alexandria in Egypt and also formulated a geocentric model of astronomy. As we know today, this model had many errors. However, for around 1500 years it was satisfactorily used by astronomers to fit their observational data.