Daniel Santbech

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Daniel Santbech was a Dutch astronomer and mathematician of the 16th century.

Life

Since he used the Latinized name Novimagus, he may have come from Nijmegen . Possibly he studied in Basel.

In 1561 he published a work in Basel with a treatise on trigonometry and sine tables by Regiomontanus (De triangulis planis et sphaericis libri quinque, Compositio tabularum sinum recto) and his own treatise Problematum astronomicorum et geometricorum . In it he deals with astronomical tasks (he follows Ptolemy , but also cites Nicolaus Copernicus ), such as measuring the time according to the stars, sundials and building a quadrant , calendar problems , land surveying tasks , information for navigation and cartographers and the calculation of trajectories (ballistics), whereby he approaches the path through a right triangle. This corresponded to the Aristotelian separation of natural (vertical fall, motus naturalis) and movement forced by the driving force of the charge (straight line along the alignment of the cannon, motus violentus) and he assumed that the length of the forced trajectory is the same regardless of the inclination of the cannon and can be determined by a single shot so that the range of fire varies with the cosine of the angle of inclination of the gun. The greatest firing range was then (in contrast to experience) with a horizontal shot. He apparently did not know the writings of Niccolò Tartaglia (La Nova Scientia 1537) on ballistics, in which he also approximates the trajectory with a circular curve and specifies the firing angle of 45 degrees as the maximum firing range.

Rivaltius (David Rivault de Fleurance, 1571-1616), in his book on artillery (Les elements de l'artillerie, Paris 1605), assumed the cosine dependence of the firing range, probably adopted by Santbech.

Although he quotes Copernicus, he was not an early Copernican in the Netherlands - Ptolemy's and Copernicus' different views on the movement of the earth are not addressed.

A moon crater is named after him (by Giovanni Riccioli 1651).

Fonts

  • Problemata Astronomica et Geometrica, 1561, online

literature

  • Andreas Kleinert: On the ballistics of Daniel Santbech, Janus, Volume 63, 1976, pp. 47–59
  • Mark Peterson Galileo's muse. Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts , Harvard University Press 2011
  • the contributions of Santbech and others to early ballistics are already dealt with in Benjamin Robin's Basic Features of Artillery (German publisher Leonhard Euler ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthias Schremmel The English Galileo. Thomas Harriot 's Work on Motion as an example of preclassical mechanics , Springer Verlag 2008, p. 30f
personal data
SURNAME Santbech, Daniel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch astronomer and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 16th Century
DATE OF DEATH 16th century or 17th century