Abraham Stern

Abraham Jacob Stern was a Polish Jewish watchmaker, inventor, educator and poet, born in Hrubieszow in 1762 or 1769 and died in 1842. He is known for his mechanical calculators: a machine he perfected in 1817 could calculate the square roots of numbers, and it led to his election as the first Jewish member of the Warsaw Society of the Friends of Science. He was presented to Tsar Alexander I, who granted him a pension. He also built a topographical wagon for measuring level surfaces and improved threshing and harvesting machines. Alongside the machines he worked as inspector of Jewish schools and as a censor of Hebrew texts, and he wrote Hebrew poetry.