Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia (in modern-day Turkey). He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second mast...

Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. He invented the discipline of geography, including the...

Hipparchus was the most important Greek astronomers of his time. He very accurately cataloged over 1,000 stars and invented the mathematical science of trigonometry. Ptolemy was a great admirer of Hipparchus's research and recorded some of...

Zhang Heng was a Chinese astronomer, mathematician, inventor, geographer, cartographer, artist, poet, statesman, and literary scholar from Nanyang, Henan. He lived during the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25–220) of China. He was educated in the...

Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Egyptian writer of Alexandria, known as a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt...

Saint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the 19th-century historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "The last scholar of the ancient world". At a time of disi...

Al-Khwarizmi was a Persian scholar who produced works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820 AD he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Al-Khwarizmi's popularizing treat...

Muhammed al-Idrisi, was an Arab Muslim geographer, cartographer and egyptologist who for some time lived in Palermo, Sicily at the court of King Roger II. Muhammed al-Idrisi was born in Ceuta then belonging to the Almoravids. He created the...

Henry the Navigator was an infante of the Kingdom of Portugal and an important figure in the early days of the Portuguese Empire. He was responsible for the early development of European exploration and maritime trade with other continents....

Fra Mauro was an Italian cartographer who lived in the Republic of Venice. He created the most detailed and accurate map of the world up until that time, the Fra Mauro map. Mauro was a monk of the Camaldolese Monastery of St. Michael, lo...

America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, who was the first European to suggest that the Americas were not the East Indies. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian merchant and cartographer who voyaged to and wrote about the Americas. His explorator...

Juan de la Cosa was a Spanish cartographer, conquistador and explorer. He made the earliest extant European world map to incorporate the territories of the Americas that were discovered in the 15th century, sailed with Christopher Columbus...

Ahmed Muhiddin Piri, better known as Piri Reis, was an Ottoman admiral, geographer, and cartographer. He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book that contains de...

Martin Waldseemüller was a German cartographer and humanist scholar. Sometimes known by the Latinized form of his name, Hylacomylus, his work was influential among contemporary cartographers. He and his collaborator Matthias Ringmann are cr...

Antonio Pigafetta was an Italian navigator born in Vicenza. He paid a large sum of money to accompany and assist the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan and his Spanish crew on their trip around the world. He kept an accurate journal of t...