In 1919, he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between North America and Africa and facilitate African-American migration to Liberia. In 1923 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud for selling its stock and imprisoned in the Atlanta State Penitentiary.
A Holocaust or something like that
<span>He miscalculated the size of the earth and thought he had reached Asia.</span>
Eratosthenes (276-194 BC) was a Greek mathematician and astronomer who made an amazingly close calculation of the actual circumference of the earth. He did it by noting the angle of shadows in two cities during the summer solstice, and then doing geometric calculations that factored in the distance between the cities.
Oh, and besides math and astronomy, Eratosthenes was also a poet and music theorist, as well as pretty much inventing the field of study we call geography today. He was what we would call a "polymath" (a person of knowledge of all sorts of things) -- or, what the Greeks called a <span>Πένταθλος (pentathlos).</span>
