Fundamentum Astronomiae
Fundamentum Astronomiae is the title of a historic book presented by Jost Bürgi to Emperor Rudolf II. in 1592. It describes Bürgi's algorithm called Artificium which can be used to calculate sines at arbitrary precision.[1] Bürgi used it to compute the «Canon Sinuum», a table of 81,000 sines of values between 0 and 45 degrees in steps of 2 arc seconds. Such tables were extremely important for navigation at sea. Johannes Kepler called the Canon Sinuum the most precise known table of sines. Artificium obtains good approximations of sines after few iterations. This was the first step towards difference calculus.[2]
References
- ^ Staudacher, S., 2014. Jost Bürgi, Kepler und der Kaiser. Verlag NZZ, Zürich.
- ^ Menso Folkerts, Dieter Launert, Andreas Thom (Oct 2015). "Jost Bürgi's Method for Calculating Sines." http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.03180