Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz

Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (1606 to 1682) was a Spanish Catholic scholastic philosopher, Cistercian ecclesiastic, mathematician, polyglot and writer, born in Madrid, who is credited with an early reasoned study of counting in bases other than ten. His source calls him the first mathematician to make such a study, a significant contribution to the development of the binary numeral system, and his Mathesis biceps presents other original mathematical contributions, including a new approximation for trisecting an angle and a form of logarithm that prefigures cologarithms, which his contemporaries did not understand. He was precocious, publishing astronomical tables at the age of ten, studied at the University of Alcalá de Henares, entered the Cistercian Order in 1625 and received a doctorate in theology from the University of Leuven in 1638.