Abstract
The late sixteenth century was an age of numerical computation, as developments in astronomy and navigation called for increasingly accurate and lengthy trigonometric computations. Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1576) began the computation of a great collection of 15-place trigonometric tables which were completed and published by Otho in 1596 and by Pitiscus in 1613. The urgent need, for some device to shorten the labor of tedious multiplications and divisions with many decimal places, was met through the invention of logarithms by Napier and others around the turn of the seventeenth century.
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© 1979 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.
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Edwards, C.H. (1979). Napier’s Wonderful Logarithms. In: The Historical Development of the Calculus. Springer Study Edition. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-6230-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-6230-5_6
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