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Ptolemy
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„There are three classes of friendship and enmity, since men are so disposed to one another either by preference or by need or through pleasure and pain.“
„As material fortune is associated with the properties of the body, so honor belongs to those of the soul.“
„I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.“
„We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.“
„Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.“
„The length of life takes the leading place among inquiries about events following birth.“
„To give here an elaborate account of Pappus would be to create a false impression. His work is only the last convulsive effort of Greek geometry which was now nearly dead and was never effectually revived. It is not so with Ptolemy or Diophantus. The trigonometry of the former is the foundation of a new study which was handed on to other nations indeed but which has thenceforth a continuous history of progress.“
„He left in his Optics, the earliest surviving table of angles of refraction from air to water. …This table, quoted and requoted until modern times, has been admired… A closer glance at it, however, suggests that there was less experimentation involved in it than originally was thought, for the values of the angles of refraction form an arithmetic progression of second order… As in other portions of Greek Science, confidence in mathematics was here greater than that in the evidence of the senses, although the value corresponding to 60° agrees remarkably well with experience.“