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@@ -50,6 +50,17 @@ This draws the path traced out by a point on the edge of a
circle. That circle rotates around a point on the rim of another
circle, and so on, several times.
+The geometry of epicycles was perfected by Hipparchus of Rhodes at some time
+around 125 B.C., 185 years after the birth of Aristarchus of Samos, the
+inventor of the heliocentric universe model. Hipparchus applied epicycles to
+the Sun and the Moon. Ptolemy of Alexandria went on to apply them to what was
+then the known universe, at around 150 A.D. Copernicus went on to apply them
+to the heliocentric model at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Johannes
+Kepler discovered that the planets actually move in elliptical orbits in about
+1602. The inverse-square law of gravity was suggested by Boulliau in 1645.
+Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, and proved that
+Kepler's laws derived from Newtonian gravitation.
+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle
Written by James Youngman; 1998.