Adriaan Vlacq

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Tabulae , 1670
Typographic mark by Vlacq

Adriaan Vlacq (* 1600 in Gouda , † 1667 in The Hague ) was a Dutch bookseller and mathematician.

Vlacq came from a well-off family. His father Cornelius Vlacq (1556–1656) was the community leader in Gouda. He received a good education, especially in Latin and other languages.

Through an acquaintance with the surveyor Ezekiel de Decker , Vlacq became interested in logarithm tables and translated for them Latin works by John Napier and Henry Briggs about logarithms into Dutch. In 1626 Decker and Vlacq published a book about the then new methods of calculation Het eerste deel van de Nieuwe telkonst (The first part of the new art of counting) with a translation of Napier's Rabdologiae ( Napier's calculators ) and La Theinde by Simon Stevin (with decimal fractions). In a further part published Decker a portion of the logarithm of Briggs (based on logarithms to the base 10) of 1624 (Arithmetica logarithma), the (lacking the logarithms 20000-90000) but only part of the logarithm to 100,000 contained. The rest followed in 1627 (Tweede deel van de Nieuwe telkonst, published under Decker's name). They were also shortened to ten places. Only a few copies of this edition are known and the edition was obviously very limited. In 1628 Vlacq published a second edition in Gouda under his own name (Latin and French). Since Decker did not raise an objection, it was generally assumed ( Dirk Struik ) that Vlacq had calculated the tables. The tablets had relatively few errors, were widely used and made Vlacq known. According to a letter from Briggs, most of the first 1000 copies had already been sold in October 1628, with many going to the London bookseller Miller, who made it his own edition.

Vlacq became a publisher and printer and, after the success of his plates, moved to London in 1632. At the beginning of the English Civil War, he moved to Paris in 1642, where he stayed for six years before moving to The Hague .

In 1633 and in a smaller version in 1636 he published tables of trigonometric functions including their logarithms in Gouda (Trigonometria artificialis sive magnus Canon triangulorum logarithmicus, in Latin, French, German), with an accuracy of seven decimal places (for logarithms ten digits and for angles in distance of 10 arc seconds). These were also a great success. As a publisher, he also published works by other mathematicians such as Briggs's.

The lunar crater Vlacq is named after him.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Article Vlacq in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. ^ This contradicts EM Bruins On the history of logarithms: Bürgi, Napier, Briggs, de Decker, Vlacq, Huygens , Janus, Volume 67, 1980, pp. 241-260, who argues that Vlacq was not a mathematician.
  3. ↑ The works mentioned were published by Pieter Rammaseyn in Gouda, with whom Vlacq was probably closely connected
personal data
SURNAME Vlacq, Adriaan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch publisher and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 1600
PLACE OF BIRTH Gouda cheese
DATE OF DEATH 1667
Place of death The hague