Jost Bürgi

Jost Bürgi (1552 to 1632) was a Swiss clockmaker, mathematician and instrument maker who worked at the courts of Kassel and Prague, and his place in computing rests on calculation aids. He built a table of sines, the Canon Sinuum, and wrote an introduction to algebra and decimal fractions that survives in a copy made by Johannes Kepler. Some authors count him among the inventors of logarithms, which he developed as a working tool for his own astronomical calculations but published only late. His clocks introduced the cross-beat escapement and the remontoire. In this atlas he is one of the early makers of calculating tables and instruments who preceded the mechanical calculator.