Bürgi, Jost

Knill, Oliver

doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_219

Oliver Knill⁹

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Alternate Names

Bürgi, Jobst; Bürgi, Joost

BornLichtensteig, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 28 February 1552

DiedKassel, (Hessen, Germany), 31 January 1632

Jost Bürgi was a clock maker, astronomer, and applied mathematician. His father was probably a fitter. Very little seems to be known about his life before 1579. It is probable that Bürgi obtained much of his knowledge in Strassburg, one of his teachers being the Swiss mathematician Kunradus Dasypodius. An indication that he did not get a systematic education is the fact that Bürgi did not know Latin, the scientific language of his time. Nevertheless, he made lasting scientific contributions that prompted some biographers to call him the “Swiss Archimedes.” Bürgi was married first to the daughter of David Bramer and then, in 1611, married Catharina Braun.

Bürgi developed a theory of logarithms independently of his Scottish contemporary John Napier . Napier’s logarithms were published in 1614; Burgi’s were published in 1620. The objective...

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Selected References

Gingerich, Owen (1980). “Jost Bürgi at Kassel.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 11: 212–213.
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Gronau, D. (1987). “Johannes Kepler und die Logarithmen.” Reports of the Mathematical Statistical Section of the Research Society Joanneum: 284.
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Nový, Luboš (1970). “Bürgi, Joost.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. Vol. 2, pp. 602–603. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
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Thoren, Victor E. (1988). “Prosthaphaeresis Revisited.” Historia Mathematica 15: 32–39.
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Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Oliver Knill

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Oliver Knill
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Correspondence to Oliver Knill .

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Editors and Affiliations

Department of Earth Science, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, USA
Thomas Hockey
University of California, Irvine School of Physical Sciences, Irvine, CA, USA
Virginia Trimble
Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
Thomas R. Williams
Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA
Katherine Bracher
York Univesity, Toronto, ON, Canada
Richard A. Jarrell
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Jordan D. Marché II
University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
JoAnn Palmeri
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Daniel W. E. Green

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Knill, O. (2014). Bürgi, Jost. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_219

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_219
Published: 24 December 2016
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-9916-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-9917-7
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyReference Module Physical and Materials ScienceReference Module Chemistry, Materials and Physics

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