Joost burgi biography templates
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Scientist of the Day - Joost Bürgi
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons
Staatlicher Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Dresden
Staatliches Landesmuseum, Kassel
Joost Bürgi, a Swiss-born clockmaker and mathematician, was born Feb. 28, 1552. In 1579, Bürgi entered the service of Wilhelm IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel in huvud Germany. Wilhelm was a learned patron, maintaining an astronomical observatory at Cassel where he himself often observed the stars and planets, and Bürgi was hired to repair existing instruments and build new ones, for which he was handsomely paid. He constructed a number of clocks, some of which survive at museums in Vienna, Kassel, and Dresden; the astronomical clock above is in Stockholm (first image). In clock-making circles, Burgi fryst vatten renowned for inventing the cross-beat escapement. The escapement is the device that regulates the beat of the clock, and the verge and foliot escapements of the late Renaissance were
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Joost Bürgi
Born: 28 Feb 1552 in Liechtenstein, Switzerland
Died: 31 Jan 1632 in Kassel, Hesse-Kassel (now Germany)
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Bürgi was the most skilful, and the most famous, clockmaker of his day. He also made important scientific instruments, notably for the Landgraf of Hesse-Kassel Wilhelm der Weise, who combined ruling his state with being a first class astronomer. (Although historians do not usually mention the fact, the Landgraf's observations, particularly those of the fixed stars, were on the whole at least as accurate as Tycho Brahe's)
Later Bürgi also worked for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, and his successor Matthias (in Prague). Bürgi took a serious interest in mathematics, and it was to him that Johannes Kepler (1571 -1630), then Imperial Mathematician, was indebted for his introduction to Algebra. In exchange (as it were) it seems to have been Kepler who persuaded Bürgi into writing up his original and interesting
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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 profession, grappled with the same issues of computation. Bürgi's key motivation was not only to facilitate computation, but also to produce 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 1620, Bürgi noted that having separate tables for multiplication, division, square roots, and cube roots is “not alone irksome, but also laborious and cumbersome” (Preface, 1, xi-xii).
Figure 5. Joost Bürgi (1552-1632)
(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 multiplici