Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known world map is the Imago Mundi, which was created around 600 BC. This artifact depicts Babylon as the center of the universe surrounded by a circular landmass and a bitter river known as Oceanus.
Anaximander, who lived between 610 and 545 BC, is credited by later Greek writers as the true founder of geography. He invented the gnomon to measure latitude with unprecedented precision and laid the groundwork for a science that combined philosophy with observation.
Abu Rayhan Biruni, who lived from 976 to 1048, estimated the Earth's radius to be 6,339.9 kilometers. This measurement was only 16.8 kilometers less than the modern value of 6,356.7 kilometers, a feat of precision that remained unmatched for centuries.
The International Meridian Conference in 1884 adopted the Greenwich meridian as the zero meridian by convention. This standardization of global navigation occurred after John Harrison solved the longitude problem in 1760 by inventing the H-4 chronometer.
Waldo Tobler proposed the first law of geography in 1970, stating that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. This law summarizes the first assumption geographers make about the world and has become the most generally accepted principle in the field.
Modern geography is organized into three main branches: physical geography, human geography, and technical geography. Physical geography studies the Earth's physical problems, human geography focuses on patterns that shape human society, and technical geography concerns the development of tools like geographic information systems.