Who first said that the world was round?

Answer 1

Pythagoras, around 500 BC proposed that the earth was round, but it was of aesthetic and mystical reasons. So the first discovered person should be an anonymous Persian or Babylonian around 3,000 years ago.

Answer 2

It was generally assumed by pretty much everyone in ancient Greece. We don't know who exactly came up with the idea, but we do know that in about 240 BC, Eratosthenes actually came up with a (rather accurate) notion of exactly how BIG it was around by measuring the angle the sun made at noon at two different points on Earth, and figuring out how big a circle would be required for that to happen... he was only off by about 2%.

Answer 3

Pythagoras was first to say it in the 6th century BC, 2100 years before Columbus and Magellan.

Whoever said Ferdinand Magellan is completely WRONG. Magellan came 27 years after Columbus first landed in the Americas in 1492, and the thought that Columbus was the first to propose the Earth was round is a myth. That fact was already widely believed by then. Magellan was first to sail around the world, not the first to say it was round.

Answer 4

That fact has been known since ancient times. The Greeks around 450 BCE measured the distance from the earth to the moon as 60 times the earth's diameter, by noting the ratio of time it took earth's shadow to cross the moon during a lunar eclipse to the moon's orbit around the earth. Clever Greeks. Then about 250 BCE Eratosthenes the Greek, working as a librarian in Alexandria, Egypt, figured out how to calculate the circumference of the earth using solstice shadows at varying latitudes.

Answer 5

The Ancient Greeks, in about 300 BC. They also calculated its size to a value very close to its true value - much closer than Columbus considered it to be.

Answer 6

ancient greeks, moslem scholars, etc.

Answer 7

Eratosthenes

Answer 8

Galileo