Nicholas Mercator

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Nikolaus Mercator (actually: Nikolaus Kauffman , * between 1619 and 1623, but probably 1620 with Cismar or in Eutin ; † January 4 or 14 or February 12, 1687 in Paris ) was a mathematician and astronomer who worked on logarithms got known.

He studied in Rostock and Leiden and was a lecturer in Rostock from 1642 to 1648, then in Copenhagen from 1648 to 1654 . From there he went to Paris (1655–1657). In 1657 he moved to England and lived in London from 1658 to 1682 . Here he built a pendulum clock that allowed more precise time measurements at sea to determine the degree of longitude . For this he was admitted to the Royal Society in 1666 . In 1682 he went to France again. He built the Versailles fountains and died there in 1687.

Mercator discovered the series for the natural logarithm (in his work Logarithmo-technica published in 1668 ):

Mercator also dealt with pure tuning and describes that by dividing the octave into 53 parts you can create a scale in almost exact natural tuning, which allows unlimited modulation. See: The division of the octave into 53 parts .

Individual evidence

  1. See the entries by Nikolaus Mercator in the Rostock matriculation portal

literature

Web links