Alternate Name
BornCyzikus (near Erdek, Turkey), circa370 BCE
Diedpossibly Athens, (Greece), circa300 BCE
Callippus, a fellow-citizen and follower of Eudoxus, is best known for his modifications to the Greek lunar calendar and to Eudoxus’ model of the planetary spheres.
Callippus made observations from the Hellespont and moved circa 334 BCE to Athens, where he associated with Aristotle . To improve the accuracy of Eudoxean planetary models, Callippus added two spheres to the model of the Sun, two to that of the Moon, and one each to the models of Mars, Venus, and Mercury. The two new spheres assigned to the Sun accounted for its unequal motion in longitude, which Meton and Euctemon had discovered a century earlier but Eudoxus ignored. Callippus assigned 94, 92, 89, and 90 days to the northern spring, summer, autumn, and winter, respectively. (The error in these numbers ranges between 0.08 and 0.44 days.) Presumably, the two new spheres for the Moon performed a similar task....
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Selected References
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Torretti, R. (2014). Callippus of Cyzikus. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_229
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