Pliny creates an encyclopedia that claims to summarize all knowledge with references to its sources.
Ptolemy's Almagest introduces epicycles to describe the detailed motion of planets.
Pedanius Dioscorides produces De Materia Medica as a pharmacopeia covering herbal and other medicines.
Galen organizes anatomy and physiology, defining many terms and concepts used today.
Philo of Byblos compiles a dictionary of synonyms and makes the earliest known thesaurus.
Decimal place-value notation from India appears in Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi's book on mathematical algorithms.
Cassiodorus founds a monastery devoted to copying, preserving, and translating classic texts, initiating the tradition of literary monasticism.
William the Conqueror orders a detailed accounting of the land and livestock in England.
Hugh of St Cher and a team of 500 other monks create a concordance of The Bible.
Ramon Llull promotes a scheme for systematically creating knowledge from formal combinations of ideas.
Moveable type makes it economical to print many kinds of documents.
French philosopher Nicole Oresme introduces the notion of drawing graphs of values.
Parishes in England keep weekly records of all christenings, marriages, and burials.
The Yongle Encyclopedia, assembled by 2,000 scholars, fills over 11,000 volumes with the collected knowledge of Chinese civilization.
Pope Gregory XIII establishes the modern calendar, changing the leap year rule for years divisible by 100.
The papal archives become the Vatican Library, which is still operating today.
Franciscus Vieta writes mathematical formulas with letters as variables, using vowels for unknowns and consonants for parameters.
This art-quality 4'10" x 16" poster timeline of the History of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge includes nearly 200 entries spanning millennia of events that have shaped the modern world of data and knowledge. Presented in its original version at the 2010 Wolfram Data Summit, this fascinating and impressive large-scale poster is the perfect piece of intellectual art for your library, office, or other wall, and is a unique gift for any enthusiast of data, technology, and its history.
