Aristarchus, << `ar` ih STAHR kuhs, >> of Samos, was a Greek astronomer who lived from about 310 B.C. to about 230 B.C. He was the first to state that the earth revolves around the sun. How he justified this claim is unknown. His writings on the subject have not come down to us, but his idea was quoted by Archimedes, the Greek mathematician. In Aristarchus’s surviving treatise, On the Magnitudes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, he said nothing about his theory of the earth’s motion.
