His nickname was Beta, because he wasn’t the best at anything, but he was just under No. 1 in a lot of things ordinary people thought were unrelated.

He was born in 276 BCE in Cyrene in modern-day Libya and led a life of intellectual pursuit and contemplation, culminating in being named chief librarian at the famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

Before that, he was a widely read poet and historian.  His list of achievements while at Alexandria was impressive, to say the least.  Among them are:

• Wrote  a three volume work in which he described in detail all of the known world, and in the process invented geography, which, not surprisingly, was the title of the work.
• Calculated the circumference of the sun, and its distance from the earth.
• Did the same for the moon.
• Not to mention the circumference of the earth while he was at it, which, contrary to what you may hear on Columbus Day, he knew was roughly spherical.
• Devised a method of finding prime numbers.

There are more achievements, but since we’re talking about second best, it seems inappropriate to continue.

The man whose very nickname was “second place” was Eratosthenes of Cyrene who lived from 276 bce to 195 bce.

By today’s ludicrous number-one-or-nothing standards, he was a miserable failure.