Joost burgi biography books

  • The book begins with a brief biography of Bürgi to familiarize readers with his life and work, as well as to offer an historical context in which to explore.
  • Jost Bürgi was a Swiss mathematician who discovered logarithms independently of the Scottish mathematician Napier.
  • Jost Bürgi active primarily at the courts in Kassel and Prague, was a Swiss clockmaker, mathematician, and writer.

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    Logarithms: The Early History of a Familiar Function - Joost Bürgi Introduces Logarithms

    At about the same time in Switzerland, Joost Bürgi, a court clock maker by yrke, grappled with the same issues of computation. Bürgi's key motivation was not only to facilitate computation, but also to producera a single table that could be applied to all arithmetical operations, rather than needing various tables to perform them all. In his work, Arithmetische und Geometrische Progress Tabulen (Arithmetic and Geometric Progression Tables), published in , Bürgi noted that having separate tables for multiplication, division, square roots, and cube roots is “not alone irriterande, but also laborious and cumbersome” (Preface, 1, xi-xii).

    Figure 5. Joost Bürgi ()
    (from MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive)

    Furthermore, Bürgi grounded his conception directly in the relation between two progressions. He stated that he was able to create one table for a multiplicity of calcula

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    Jost Bürgi

    Jost Bürgi's first name is sometime written as Joost, Jobst or Justus while his second name is sometime written in a Latin form Byrgius. He was born in Lichtensteig, a small village of around inhabitants at this time. His grandfather, Lienhard Bürgi, was a locksmith and a leading official of the village which had been divided by the Protestant Reformation. The Bürgi family was Protestant in a village which was equally divided between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

    It is conjectured that Jost Bürgi decided to leave Lichtensteig, partly because of the religious divide and partly because of the lack of educational opportunities in the small town. Before leaving he had acquired a knowledge of reading and numeracy at elementary school but had not had the opportunity to progress beyond this basic stage. It is clear from the skills that he acquired over the floowing few years, that Bürgi must have served an apprenticeship to a blacksmith, instrument maker and watchmaker b

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    Jost Bürgi

    Swiss clock and instrument maker (–)

    This article is about the Swiss clock and instrument maker. For the Swiss chemist, see Hans-Beat Bürgi.

    Jost Bürgi (also Joost, Jobst; Latinized surname Burgius or Byrgius; 28 February – 31 January [1]), active primarily at the courts in Kassel and Prague, was a Swiss clockmaker, mathematician, and writer.

    Life

    [edit]

    Bürgi was born in Lichtensteig, Toggenburg, at the time a subject territory of the Abbey of St. Gall (now part of the canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland). Not much is known about his life or education before his employment as astronomer and clockmaker at the court of William IV in Kassel in ; it has been theorized that he acquired his mathematical knowledge at Strasbourg, among others from Swiss mathematician Conrad Dasypodius, but there are no facts to support this.[1]

    Although an autodidact, he was already during his lifetime considered as one of the most excellent mechanical e

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