Johann Muller, who was born in Germany on the 16th June 1436, was a central figure in the scientific renaissance, which took place in the 15th century. The renaissance (translation re-birth), was named by its main protagonists who saw it as a return to the newly rediscovered teachings of ancient Greece and Rome. Johann Muller in affectatiously taking the name Regiomontanus, a Latin form of his own home-town Konigsberg ‘Kings Mountain’, shows just how important this movement encompassing the study of Latin and Greek had become.
Regiomontanus was a brilliant scholar from a very young age, enrolling in the University of Leipzig when he was twelve. At the University he was able to produce more accurate calculations of planets positions than those produced by the college. At the age of fourteen he moved to the more prestigious Vienna University, where after finishing his studies, he joined the faculty and he collaborated with Georg Peuerbach (real name) who was the leading astronomer of his day. Evidence shows that in 1457, when Regiomontanus was twenty-one, they worked together on recording an eclipse of the moon.
Their collaboration was so close that in 1461, on his deathbed, Peuerbach extracted a promise from that Regiomontanus that he would continue his unfinished translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest. The subsequent publication, “Epitome” a multi-volume translation, was largely produced by Regiomontanus. It was a model of clarity, which involved him in rewriting whole sections of the ancient book to make them conform to the contemporary scientific thought of the day. He also produced an extensive book on triangles, which required him to produce for the first time accurate sine and cosine tables to 6 decimal places. The sine tables, that you possibly used at school, use the same figures except for a few minor corrections from the ones produced by Regiomontanus.
From 1467 Regiomontanus worked under the patronage of King Mathias, (with no teaching duties) first at the University of Pressburg then in Nuremberg. In Nuremberg he did extensive observations that were more accurate than anyone had done before. He recorded the passage of a comet, this was some 200 years before it was named after Halley, and was the first person to suggest that latitude could be calculated by accurate observations of the Moon (which he had started).
He started collaboration with the merchant Bernard Walther (1430-1504) which enabled him to set up his own printing press on which the first scientific publications were produced. On the presses he also made popular calendars, these included charts for predicted sunrise, sunset, conversions of planetary hours to terrestrial hours, and predicted eclipses. The prediction of the lunar eclipse on 29 February 1504 were said to have been used by Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage, 30 years after its first publication, to frighten natives in Jamaica.22
The calculations of the correct date of Easter made by Regiomontanus brought him to the attention of the church and he was summoned to a conference in Rome on the reform of the calendar in July 1476. There is no reliable information about what happened to him on his arrival in Rome, where he may have been made a bishop, some accounts state that he was poisoned but it is more likely that he died of the plague aged forty.
It is very likely that Regiomontanus with his prodigious intelligence and capacity for hard work had he lived could have made a more significant contribution to astronomy and mathematics. One of his main contributions to astronomy were his accurate observations, continued after his death by Bernard Walther which were the basis on which others such as Copernicus and Kepler made their discoveries.
by C.Maskill
References:
“Revolutionising The Sciences” by Peter Dear.
