Akademik

(Johannes Müller, 1436-1476)

   German astronomer and mathematician, known primarily because of the astro-nomical tables (Ephemerides, 1474) he compiled and his Latin sum-mary of Ptolemy's Almagest, a project begun by his older colleague Georg Peurbach and completed by Regiomontanus, who called it an Epitome (1463; first printed, 1496). Virtually nothing is known about his life before he entered the University of Vienna in 1450. He started teaching there in 1457 and became a close friend of Peurbach, whose work on Ptolemy was stimulated by a visit in 1460 to Vienna by the papal legate, the Greek-born Cardinal Johannes Bessarion. Bessarion inspired Regiomontanus to learn Greek. Regiomontanus also studied trigonometry and wrote a work, De triangulis omnimodis / On All Classes of Triangles (1463-1464; first published in 1533), and another mathematical treatise, Tabulae directionum / Tables of Directions (1467-1468). In 1471 he settled in Nuremberg and set up a press for publication of scientific works. His first publication was an edition of Peurbach's Theoricae novae planetarum / New Theory of the Planets.