and floated supported by 'strong' air under it and disturbances in this air sometimes caused earthquakes. He introduced the notion of panspermia, that life exists throughout the universe and could be distributed everywhere. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the Sun, which he described as a mass of blazing metal, larger than the Peloponnese; He also said that the Moon had mountains and believed that it was inhabited. The heavenly bodies, he asserted, were masses of stone torn from the Earth and ignited by rapid rotation. His theories about eclipses, the Sun, and Moon may well have been based on observations of the eclipse of 463 BCE, which was visible in Greece. Mathematics According to Plutarch in his work On exile, Anaxagoras is the first Greek to attempt the problem of squaring the circle, a problem he worked on while in prison. Legacy Anaxagoras wrote a book of philosophy, but only fragments of the first part of this have survived, through preservation in the work of Simplicius of Cilicia in the 6th century AD.. Anaxgoras' book was reportedly available for a drachma in the Athenian marketplace,. It was certainly known to Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes based on the contents of their surviving plays, and possibly to Aeschylus as well, based on the testimony of Seneca. However, although Anaxagoras almost certainly lived in Athens during the lifetime of Socrates (born 470 BCE), there is no evidence that they ever met. In the Phaedo, Plato portrays Socrates saying of Anaxagoras as a young man: 'I eagerly acquired his books and read them as quickly as I could'. However, Socrates goes on to describe his later disillusionment with his philosophy. Anaxagoras is also mentioned by Socrates during his trial in Plato's Apology. He is also mentioned in Seneca's Natural Questions (Book 4B, originally Book 3: On Clouds, Hail, Snow) It reads: "Why should I too allow myself the same liberty as Anaxagoras allowed himself?" The Roman author Valerius Maximus preserves a different tradition: Anaxagoras, coming home from a long voyage, found his property in ruin, and said: "If this had not perished, I would have"—a sentence described by Valerius as being "possessed of sought-after wisdom" Dante Alighieri places Anaxagoras in the First Circle of Hell (Limbo) in his Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto IV, line 137). Chapter 5 in Book II of De Docta Ignorantia (1440) by Nicholas