Nicolaas Struyck

Nicolaas Struyck (born May 21, 1686 in Amsterdam ; † May 15, 1769 ibid) was a Dutch mathematician , astronomer , geographer and pioneer of statistics in the Netherlands .

life and work

Struyck was the son of a goldsmith in Amsterdam and a member of the Lutheran congregation. In his earliest youth he was an avid insect collector. Nothing is known about his upbringing, but he had a good knowledge of mathematics, geography and languages. His first publication was An Introduction to Geography, which he published in 1739 after twenty years of study. He had studied the Principia of Isaac Newton and was heavily influenced by Edmond Halley . Like Halley, he was involved in many fields and was inspired by him to study both comets (he expanded Halley's list from 24 by 18) and mortality tables ( actuarial ) (he was the first to recognize different statistical life expectancies for women and men). Like Halley, he studied historical eclipses and contradicted Halley's conclusion that from these he could infer a variability of the moon's orbital period in the past. His book on comets with a critical examination of the sightings in the past appeared in 1740, his list of orbital data as an extension of Halley's list in 1749 (Viae cometarum) and the presentation of empirical material in 1753. As accurate astronomical observation data can rarely be found in historical sources were, he used the periodicity of the comet's appearance for identification (not a promising method from today's point of view, but he assumed that there were relatively few comets). He also used cumbersome mathematical methods to calculate the orbital elements, despite the advances made since Newton, particularly by Leonhard Euler in this area of ​​his time.

In 1716 his treatise on probability theory appeared (anonymously) , where he was inspired by Jakob I Bernoulli and Abraham de Moivre , whose works appeared in 1713 (Ars Conjectandi) and 1711 (Latin version of de Moivre's book), and gave solutions to problems Games of chance that Christian Huygens introduced in 1657.

After the math historian Dirk Struik (who is not related to him), he was the most important mathematician of his time in the Netherlands, which experienced a decline in mathematics compared to the 17th century. He corresponded with scientists such as Euler, Halley, Pierre Bouguer , Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (whose astronomical expedition to the Cape of Good Hope he supported), Cassini , Willem Jacob's Gravesande , Alexandre Guy Pingré , Charles Messier , Johann Samuel König and Joseph- Nicolas Delisle . He was friends with the astronomers Dirk Klinkenberg and Cornelis Douwes , who also provided him with some comet calculations for his book. Since he only published in Dutch during his lifetime, his influence outside the Netherlands was limited.

In 1749 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , he was the correspondent of the Academie des Sciences in Paris and, since its establishment, a member of the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in Haarlem.

He was wealthy and on his death left four houses worth 21,000 florins .

Fonts

• Uytreekening der Kanssen in het speelen, door de Arithmetica en Algebra, beneevens een verhandeling van Looterijen en Interest, 1716
• Inleiding to the algemeene geografie, 1739
• Vervolg van de Beschrijving der staartsterren en nadere ontdekkingen omtrent the state van´t menselyk geslagt, 1753 (comet)
• JA Vollgraff Les Oeuvres de Nicolaas Struyck , Amsterdam 1912, Archives (French translation of his writings, with biography by SRJ van Schevichaven)

literature

• Huib Zuidervaart: Early Quantification of Scientific Knowledge: Nicolaas Struyck (1687-1769) as a collector of empirical data , pdf
• Marius van Haaften : Nicolaas Struyck en zijn Sterftetafels , Part 1, pdf ,