Jost burgi biography of alberta

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.

Although an autodidact, he was already during his lifetime considered as one of the most excellent mechanical engineers of his generation. A copy of the translation survived in Graz , it is thus called "Grazer Handschrift".

Jost Bürgi (–). He was born

In , he entered the service of emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Here, he befriended Johannes Kepler. It is undocumented where he learned his clockmaking skills, but eventually he became the most innovative clock and scientific instrument maker of his time. This allowed for the first time clocks to be used as scientific instruments, with enough accuracy to time the passing of stars and other heavenly bodies in the crosshairs of telescopes to start accurately charting stellar positions.

Working as an instrument maker for the court of William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel in Kassel [ 12 ] he played a pivotal role in developing the first astronomical charts. He supposedly used these algorithms to calculate a « Canon Sinuum », a table of sines to 8 places in steps of 2 arc seconds. Nothing more is known on this table, and some authors have speculated that its range was only over 45 degrees.

Such tables were extremely important for navigation at sea. Johannes Kepler called the Canon Sinuum the most precise known table of sines. The final cell's value is divided by two, and the next iteration starts. Finally, the values of the last column get normalized. Rather accurate approximations of sines are obtained after few iterations.