Who discovered that earth is round not flat? And where from was this person?
In the sixth century BCE, the greek philosopher Pythagoras suggested that the Earth must be round because a sphere is a ‘perfect’ shape, and only a spherical Earth would match with the perfect harmony of the Universe. Although he didn’t provide much of an empirical foundation for this assertion, the idea of a spherical Earth had become commonplace in academic circles within the next few hundred years at most. In the fourth century BCE another greek, Aristotle, recognized that, since some stars visible at southern latitudes were never visible from northern latitudes, the surface of the Earth must be curved. About a hundred years later, Eratosthenes (also a greek…noticing a pattern here?) made a fairly accurate measurement of the Earth’s circumference, and thus its radius (the relationship between circumference and radius was fairly well known by that time, although the value of pi had not yet been computed to a great degree of precision). Although there are some indications that india
