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Albertus Magnus, German scholastic scientist; the preeminent medieval man of science; teacher of Thomas Aquinas.
MAJREETI, Abu al-Qasem al- (950-1007) Spanish-Arab mathematician, astronomer, author - Jordan 1278.
A Scientist from Spain who performed measurements of the Spain Pacific territory.
A joint issue of France and Finland commemorates simultaneous 1736 French expeditions to the equator in South America and the polar regions of Lapland to determine the shape of the earth, generally acknowledged to be spherical. Charles LaCondamine (1701-1774) in Peru and Pierre Maupertuis (1698-1759) in Lapland surveyed the curvature of the meridians and found that the earth was somewhat flattened at the pole, and more curved at the equator, giving it the shape of an oblate spheroid. Maupertuis developed a theory of the evolution of species. He writes: “Chance one might say, turned out a vast number of individuals; a small proportion of these were organized in such a manner that the animals organs could satisfy their needs. A much greater number showed neither adaptation nor order; These last have all perished -- thus the species which we see today are but a small part of all those that a blind destiny has produced." Essaie de Cosmologie
Latin name of Gerhard Kremer, was a Flemish cartographer, geographer and mathematician best known for his mapping work, especially the Mercator projection, which used straight lines to indicate latitude and longitude. He was born in Rupelmonde. In 1537 he produced his first map. Mercator studied in Leuven, Belgium, under Gemma Frisius, and in 1552 he became a mapmaker and lecturer at the University of Duisburg. His map of Europe (published in 1554) was the best of its kind for many decades. He produced a map of the British Isles in 1564 and in the same year was made court cosmographer to Duke William of Cleve. In 1568 he devised and produced a system of map projection, now called Mercator projection. This system represents meridians by parallel lines and parallels of latitude by straight lines intersecting the meridians at right angles. The projection's graphic distortions of the relative sizes of countries and continents affects global thinking for four hundreds years. He also invents the word atlas, to describe a book of maps. Only four copies of this map are known to exist. Mercator's great Atlas (begun in 1569), in which he sought to describe the creation and history of the world, was printed in its unfinished state by his son in 1595.
Turbulent events took place as soon as he had settled down in Belgrade when the Balkan Wars were followed by World War I. When the war broke out in 1914 (he was just married), he was interned by Austro-Hungarian army in Nezsider and later in Budapest, where he was allowed to work in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. As early as 1912, his interests turned to solar climates and temperatures prevailing on the planets. Throughout his internment in Budapest he devoted his time to the work in this field and, by the end of the war, he had finished a monograph on the problem which was published in 1920, in the editions of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts by Gauthiers-Villards in Paris, under the title Théorie mathématique des phénomènes thermiques produits par la radiation solaire (Mathematical theory of thermic phenomena caused by solar radiations). The results set forth in this work won him a considerable reputation in the scientific world, notably for his curve of insolation at the Earth's surface. This solar curve was not really accepted until 1924 when the great meteorologist and climatologist Vladimir Koeppen with his son-in-law Alfred Wegener, introduced the curve in their work, entitled "Climates of the geological past". After these first tributes, Milankovic was invited, in 1927, to cooperate in two important publications: the first was a handbook on climatology (Handbuch der Klimatologie) and the second a handbook on geophysics (Guttenberg's Handbuch der Geophysik). For the former, he wrote the introduction Mathematische Klimalehre und astronomische Theorie der Klimaschwankungen (Mathematical science of climate and astronomical theory of the variations of the climate), published in 1930 in German and in 1939 translated into Russian. Here the theory of planetary climate is further developed with special reference to the Earth. For the second textbook, Milankovic wrote four sections developing and formulating his theory of the secular motion of the Earth's poles and his theory of glacial periods (Milankovitch cycles), which was built on earlier work by James Croll. Milankovitch was able to advance on Croll's work partly by improved calculations of the earths orbit then recently published by Ludwig Pilgim in 1904. Fully aware that his theory of solar radiation had been successfully completed and that the papers dealing with this theory were dispersed in separate publications, he decided to collect and publish them under a single cover. Thus, in 1941, on the eve of war in his country, the printing of his great work Kanon der Erdbestrahlung und seine Anwendung auf das Eiszeitenproblem (Canon of Insolation of the Earth and Its Application to the Problem of the Ice Ages) was completed, 626 pages in quarto, in Cemian, published in the editions of the Royal Serbian Academy. This work was translated into English under the title Canon of Insolation of the Ice-Age Problem, in 1969 by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations and published for the U.S. Department of commerce and the National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C. Objections were raised in the 1950s against the Milankovic theory of ice ages; these objections came mainly from meteorologists who claimed that the insolation changes due to the changes in the Earth's orbital elements were too small to significantly perturb the climate system. However, in the late 1960s and 1970s, investigation of the deep-sea sediments brought widespread acceptance of Milankovic's view, since the periodicity discovered (100,000 years) matched so closely with the longest orbital period - see Ice age for more discussion.
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