MATHEMATICIAN, ASTRONOMER, GEOGRAPHER

Life
Geminus studied with Posidonius at his school in Rhodes and wrote introductory works on astronomy and mathematics. A crater on the moon has been named in his honour, as has a group of shooting stars, the "geminids".


Work
His principal works are:

"Introduction to phenomena": Extant. Detailed. Contains all the most important astronomical theories of the ancient world, treated in accordance with the system of Hipparchus.

"Summary of the Posidonian Interpretation of Meteorological Phenomena": Fragments extant in Greek and Arabic.

"On the classification of mathematics": History of mathematics. Fragments extant in Greek and Arabic. Divides pure mathematics into Arithmetic and Geometry, and applied mathematics into Accountancy, Surveying, Harmony, Optics, Mechanics and Astronomy.

In his work Geminus continued the astronomic tradition which began with Eudoxus.