Map-maker: Anaximander of Miletus

Anaximander (611-547 BC) was the pupil of Thales. His writings are now lost, but he is credited with a variety of novel ideas.

Anaximander was the first to have developed anything like cosmological system; he was also the first among the Greeks who draft a map and to construct a globe.

He offered a much more detailed picture of the world. He maintained that the earth was in the center of all things, suspended freely and without support, whereas Thales regarded it as resting on water.

Anaximander computed the size of the Sun and its distance from the earth with only slight error. He contended that thunder and lightning were cause by blasts of wind, not by Zeus’s thunderbolts.

Anaximander appears to have stated that the world is governed by the opposites like hot and cold, wet and dry. It is by the working of the opposites that the world goes on.

Anaximander was the first Greek to use sundial, and with it found the dates of the two solstices (shortest and longest days) and of the equinoxes (the two annual occasions when day and night are equal).
Map-maker: Anaximander of Miletus