As with many of his contemporaries, the only extant facts about the life of Aristarchus involve remarks about him and his work written by others. Only one of Aristarchus' writings survived, On the Magnitudes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, but in it he articulated the reasoning behind what later became modern trigonometry, and how it might be employed in astronomy and navigation. Typical of Greek mathematics was Aristarchus' primarily geometric method of approximating this strategy of triangulation. From Archimedes, it is known that Aristarchus had proposed the sun be considered a fixed star, with the Earth circulating around it. This view was ridiculed at the time and remained dormant until Nicolaus Copernicus devised his heliocentric theory.

Birth and death dates for Aristarchus vary, but it is agreed that he was born on the island of Samos in Greece and studied under Strato (or Straton) of Lampsacus...