Jurij Vega

Jurij Vega (1754 to 1802) was a Slovene mathematician, physicist and artillery officer who taught mathematics at the Artillery School in Vienna from 1780. His lasting contribution to calculation was a series of books of logarithmic tables, beginning in 1783, of which the Thesaurus Logarithmorum Completus of 1794 became the best known. It built on the earlier tables of Adriaan Vlacq, corrected many of their errors and extended the logarithms of trigonometric functions for small angles. His handbook of 1793 was translated into several languages and issued in more than one hundred editions, so for generations engineers, surveyors and astronomers did their multiplication and division by looking up his pages. He also served in several campaigns and in 1795 designed two 30-pound mortars with conically drilled bases that increased firing range.