Hipparchus of Nicea (190 BCE - 120 BCE) was an ancient Greek mathematician,

astronomer and geographer, regarded by many historians as a scientist of the

highest quality and possibly the greatest astronomical genius among the ancient
Greeks. Basing most of his success on systematically exploiting the Chaldean and
Babylonian astronomical knowledge and techniques, many of his achievements in
astronomy remained widely accepted for 17 centuries.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Around Hipparchus' time, Aristotelian cosmology dominated Greek thought. This
model was based on the idea that the earth was the centre of the universe and that
circular planetary motions were perfectly uniform. However, it was a rigid model
that could not account for certain observations such as the changes in the
brightness of the planets, their retrograde motions, and changes in their speeds:
these observations clearly contradicted the Aristotelian model. This gap between
theory and observation, though, was not significant among Greeks until Alexander
the Great conquered the East and Greek geometrical astronomy began to merge
with the observational-based Babylonian astronomy.

The Babylonians for centuries kept accurate astronomical observational records

and they also had arithmetical tools and a numeral system for writing numbers
with sixty as its base, all of which was unknown to the Greeks: Hipparchus
incorporated these innovations into Greek thought and, based on the Babylonian
numeral system, started to divide circles into 360 degrees. The old mathematical
prejudice of uniform circular planetary motion was too strong to be discarded but
now there was a greater concern for observational facts.

The flexibility lacked by the Aristotelian model was partially overcome by two
geometrical tools created by Apollonius of Perga around 200 BCE. He suggested
replacing the conventional circles by eccentric circles. In an eccentric circle the
planets moved as usual in a uniform circular motion around the earth, but our
planet was not the centre of the circle, rather, offset the centre. This way, the
planet’s speed changes could be accounted for and also the changes in brightness:
planets would appear to move faster, and also brighter, when they were nearer the
earth, and slower, and also dimmer, when they were away on the far side of their
orbit. Apollonius came up with an additional tool, the epicycle, an orbit within an
orbit (the moon revolves around the earth and the earth orbits the sun or, in other
words, the moon moves around the sun in an epicycle). This device could also
account for changes in brightness and speed but it could also account for the
retrograde motions of the planets which had puzzled most Greek astronomers.