noun
definition
A comprehensive treatise on astronomy, alchemy, geography and/or mathematics (originally compiled by Ptolemy circa 150 C.E.).
Examples of almagest in a Sentence
A quarrel with George of Trebizond, the blunders in whose translation of the Almagest he had pointed out, obliged him to quit Rome precipitately in 1468.
Ptolemy's Almagest, the works of Apollonius, Archimedes, Diophantus and portions of the Brahmasiddhanta, were also translated.
In his investigation he employed the eclipses of the moon recorded in the Almagest, the Arabian eclipses between A.D.
His most celebrated work is the Latin version by which alone Ptolemy's Almagest was known to Europe until the discovery of the original Meyan I un-a ts.
He is to be distinguished from another Alhazen who translated Ptolemy's Almagest in the 10th century.
The Almagest was the consummation of Greek astronomy.
The first Arabic translation of the Almagest was made by order of Harun al-Rashid about the year Boo; others followed, and the Caliph Arah al-Mamun built in 829 a grand observatory at astro- Bagdad.
He lectured with applause at Vienna from 1450; was joined there in 1452 by Regiomontanus; and was on the point of starting for Rome to inspect a manuscript of the Almagest when he died suddenly at the age of thirty-eight.
The Mecanique celeste, in which Laplace welded into a whole the items of knowledge accumulated by the labours of a century, has been termed the " Almagest of the 18th century " (Fourier).
And three hundred years after Hipparchus, the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy adopted a very similar scheme in his uranometria, which appears in the seventh and eighth books of his Almagest, the catalogue being styled the "EKOfois Kavovud7 or " accepted version."
The names and orientation of the constellations therein adopted are, with but few exceptions, identical with those used at the present day; and as it cannot be doubted that Ptolemy made only very few modifications in the system of Hipparchus, the names were adopted at least three centuries before the Almagest was compiled.
But the pupil soon found his teacher to be but a charlatan, and betook himself, aided by commentaries, to master logic, geometry and the Almagest.
The celestial globe of Hipparchus still existed in the Alexandrian library in the time of Ptolemy, who himself refers to globes in his Almagest, as also in the Geography.
It is substantially embodied in Ptolemy's Almagest (see Ptolemy).