José Anastácio da Cunha

Book by da Cunha

José Anastácio da Cunha (born March 11, 1744 in Lisbon , Portugal , † January 1, 1787 ibid) was a Portuguese mathematician and poet .

Live and act

José Anastácio da Cunha was born the son of the painter Lourenço da Cunha and Jacinta Ignes. He graduated from high school at the Oratorian College in Lisbon, teaching subjects were rhetoric , grammar and logic . Natural sciences were not part of the curriculum because of the anti-scientific stance of the church; he taught himself physical and mathematical principles on his own. In 1763 he embarked on a military career for around ten years, during which he rose to the rank of lieutenant in the artillery . He was mainly stationed in Valença do Minho . The gifted man was able to speak fluent English , French , Italian , Latin and ancient Greek in addition to his mother tongue .

In 1773 he became professor of geometry at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Coimbra, which was established by the progressive Marques de Pombal . He remained in this office until 1778. After the death of King Joseph I and the overthrow of Prime Minister Pombal, times became harder again for liberal-minded people, and various scientific institutions were closed.

In 1778 Cunha was denigrated by the Inquisition , arrested and brought before a tribunal of the Sancto Officio da Inquisicao de Lisboa, the office of the Inquisition in Lisbon. He was accused of being a scientist, allegedly eating meat on the meatless days and owning books by Voltaire , Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . He was sentenced to three years in prison and released in 1781 after serving his full term. However, his health was so badly damaged by imprisonment that he died a few years later. From 1781 until his death he worked as a simple math teacher at the famous Casa Pia - São Lucas school .

He died in his hometown on January 1, 1787, at the age of only 42.

Work and meaning

He wrote an encyclopedia of mathematics in 21 volumes ( Principios Mathemáticos ), in which he dealt with analysis in addition to algebra and geometry, whereby he attached importance to strict methods in analysis, which was untypical for his time. Among other things, he anticipated the Cauchy criterion , which, however, was obscured in the French translation, so that mathematicians became aware of it relatively late. Adolf Juschkewitsch placed him in a row with Augustin Louis Cauchy , Niels Henrik Abel and Bernard Bolzano in the introduction of strict methods in analysis.

He published his encyclopedia in Portuguese from 1782 and it was published in full in 1790. Most mathematicians were familiar with it through its French translation in 1811. Overall, the reception was low and da Cunha had little influence on the math. In a letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Carl Friedrich Gauß commented positively on the introduction of the logarithm by da Cunha through power series expansion (and criticized an anonymous negative review especially of this point by da Cunha in the Göttingen scholarly advertisements from 1811, which he describes as bad) .

His poetic work consisted of numerous poems, mainly sonnets , but which only appeared after his death. Some verses in anthologies had been published beforehand , also posthumously.

A street in Lisbon is named after the mathematician. Next to Pedro Nunes , José Anástacio da Cunha is the most important mathematician that Portugal had ever produced.

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• Principios Mathematicos, encyclopedia in 21 volumes, published posthumously in 1790.
• Ensaio sobre os prinicpais da mechanica, posthumously, 1807.
• Composiçoes poeticas de Jose Anastacio da Cunha, (Poetic compositions), poetry, 1839, posthumously.

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• [1]
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  José Anastácio da Cunha. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Yushkevich JA da Cunha et les fondements de l'analysis infinitesimal , Rev. Sci Histoire. Appl., Vol. 26, 1973, pp. 3-22
2. ↑ November 21, 1811, Gauß-Bessel Briefwechsel, Leipzig 1880, p. 153