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This 400 year old book should have changed mathematics forever

2024-02-17

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Modifications to Burgi’s Book

I made a couple changes to Burgi’s tables to make this video easier to follow. Burgi’s red numbers are scaled by a factor of ten - I removed this in some locations - also his tables didn’t include any decimal places - this notation had not been developed yet. There are no decimal places in his original work - I added the decimal points in some locations for clarity.

Book Recommendation

Sections of this video are based on a terrific book by Klaus Truemper - despite it’s terrible cover, it’s a great read with an original viewpoint, and we only covered a small portion here - you can buy a copy on my amazon storefront here: https://amzn.to/3u2Rt7x

Special thanks to the Patrons

Juan Benet, Ross Hanson, Yan Babitski, AJ Englehardt, Alvin Khaled, Eduardo Barraza, Hitoshi Yamauchi, Jaewon Jung, Mrgoodlight, Shinichi Hayashi, Sid Sarasvati

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References

The Daring Invention of Logarithm Tables - Klaus Truemper

The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets - Martin Campbell-Kelly

Description of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms - John Napier

Jost Bürgi's Aritmetische und Geometrische Progreß Tabulen - Kathleen Clark

Arithmetic and Geometric Progression Tables - Jost Burgi 1620