Johannes Geysius

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Johannes Geysius was a German mathematician (arithmetic master) of the 17th century.

Little is known about his identity. Possibly it is about the pastor Johannes Geysius in Kölschhausen , who died after 1632 , married to the daughter Catharina Hoen of the town clerk of Herborn Wilhelm Hoen .

The treatment of algebra (Cossa) in the encyclopedia of Johann Heinrich Alsted (Volume 3, pp. 865-874), published in Herborn in 1630, comes from Geysius . It appears to be a separate treatise inserted by Alsted. Alsted describes him in his encyclopedia as a Cossist, a kind of higher arithmetic master. Alsted was a professor at the well-known reformed high school in Herborn, the High School in Herborn .

Geysius derives the word Cossa (for algebra) from Hebrew, from the word for weaving. He also writes that Coss is also called Almucabala (hidden tradition) or algebra. He also deals with equations of the second and third degree, the latter in the manner common before Gerolamo Cardano .

John Collins refers to him in a letter to John Wallis dated July 21, 1668 as a forerunner of William Oughtred (Clavis Mathematicae 1631) in connection with his algebra notation (e.g. for ) and thus corrects Wallis' treatment of the history of algebra . In addition to Geysius, he mentions Giovanni Camillo Glorioso (1572–1643), the successor of Galileo Galilei in Padua , with his Exercitationes mathematicae (1627) and Pietro Cataldi as the forerunner of Oughtred . Collins also states in the letter that prior to the Clavis' appearance, Geysius published books on algebra and stereometry about which nothing else is known.

Geysius is also mentioned in a letter from Collins about Henry Oldenburg to Tschirnhaus in 1676. There is no further information on Geysius, except that he is German, Collins notes that he improved the unfortunate algebra notation of François Viète at about the same time as Harriot .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See article Wilhelm Hoen . The village of Kölschhausen (Kölshusen) used to belong to Herborn (Zedlers Lexikon, Herborn article).
  2. ^ Jens Hoyrup Baroque mind set and new science , Sarton Lecture, Gent 2008, preprint MPI for the history of science in Berlin
  3. ↑ Quoted from Florian Cajori History of Mathematical Notations , Dover 1993, p. 218. The letter is reprinted in SP Rigaud Correspondence of scientific men in the seventeenth century , Oxford 1841, Volume 2, p. 492
  4. ↑ According to Jacqueline Stedall , the letter is probably not to Wallis, but to an unknown addressee and was therefore incorrectly classified by the editors. Stedall A discourse concerning algebra. English algebra to 1685 , Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 235. Stedall also notes that he cannot find out anything about Geysius. According to Stedall there is also no evidence that Oughtred knew Geysius writing
  5. ^ Wallis deals primarily with Oughtred and Thomas Harriot
  6. ^ Leibniz Werke III-1, Akademie-Verlag 1988, p. 399 (Commentary by Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann ), google books
personal data
SURNAME Geysius, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician (arithmetic master)
DATE OF BIRTH 16th century or 17th century
DATE OF DEATH 17th century