Anaximander

Hello. My name is Anaximander. I lived a very, very long time ago in a place called Ancient Greece. I was born around the year 610 BCE in a busy city called Miletus, which was right next to the big, sparkling sea. I loved to look up at the night sky. The stars were like tiny, glittering lights, and they made me wonder about so many things. I was always asking big questions that didn't have easy answers. I would look around at the trees, the ocean, and the sky and ask myself, 'Where did everything come from?'. I didn't just want to hear old stories; I wanted to find answers by thinking very hard about the world around me.

I had a wonderful teacher whose name was Thales. He was one of the wisest people in all of Miletus, and he taught me to look at the world and try to understand it. Thales had his own big idea. He thought that everything in the entire world, from the rocks to the clouds, was made out of water. I thought that was a very interesting idea, but I had a different one. I believed there was something else, something you couldn't see or touch, that was the beginning of everything. I called it the 'apeiron'. That's a big word, but it just means something that is endless and has no boundaries. I imagined it as a mysterious, powerful 'stuff' that everything in the whole universe was made from—the sun, the moon, the earth, and even us.

I also had a very surprising idea about our planet, Earth. In my time, many people thought the Earth was flat, like a dinner plate. But I didn't think so. I also didn't think it was being held up by anything at all. I imagined that the Earth was shaped like a big stone drum or a cylinder. The most amazing part of my idea was that I believed it was just floating in the middle of space, with nothing holding it in place. I also loved learning about different places on our Earth. In the 6th century BCE, I took all the knowledge I could find from sailors and travelers and I drew one of the very first maps of the whole world that we knew about. It showed all the lands and seas as I understood them.

I lived to be about 64 years old. Even though I lived so long ago, people still remember me and my big ideas. I was one of the first people to try and explain how the world works using science and thinking instead of just telling stories about gods and magic. My questions about the stars, my idea of the 'apeiron', and my early maps of the world helped other thinkers for many, many years to come. I hoped to show everyone that asking questions is the first step to understanding our amazing universe.