Ptolemy dominated the popular and literary view of the universe throughout the Middle Ages. The world as depicted in Dante’s Divine Comedy came right out of Ptolemy’s Almagest In many ways Ptolemy spoke as a prophet. For he enlarged the uses of mathematics in the service of science. While he drew on the best observations made before him, he emphasized the need for repeated, increasingly precise observation. In fact, Ptolemy was a harbinger of the scientific spirit, an unsung pioneer of the experimental method.
