Benjamin Bramer

Benjamin Bramer (1588 to 1652) was a German mathematician, architect, inventor and adviser, born in Felsberg in Hesse. His father, a Protestant minister, died when he was three, and he was raised in Kassel by his brother-in-law Jost Burgi, who taught him mathematics and architecture and took him to the imperial court at Prague for about five years. Back in Hesse he worked as an architectural adviser, then turned to military fortification when the Thirty Years War began, improving Rheinfels Castle and in 1635 becoming master builder of Ziegenhain Fortress. His first scientific work, published in 1614, described ways to calculate sines, and he also wrote on the vacuum. In 1630 he built an early pantograph for drawing geometric perspective, a design the article judges better than the one later published by Christoph Scheiner.