Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy worked as a mathematician and astronomer in Roman Alexandria. The Almagest is antiquity's fullest system of mathematical astronomy. Epicycles, deferents, and equants save the appearances of planetary motion with accuracy no rival matched for centuries. Ptolemy treated the models as geometrical tools and made no strong claim that they pictured the physical heavens, while still rejecting a rotating earth on Aristotelian grounds. The question whether a theory that predicts well must also describe real causes is the problem Kepler and others later refused to leave open.