Erasmus Reinhold

Erasmus Reinhold was a German astronomer and mathematician, born in Saalfeld in Thuringia on 22 October 1511 and died there on 19 February 1553. He studied at the University of Wittenberg under Jakob Milich, graduating as Magister in 1535. In 1536, at the instigation of Philipp Melanchthon, he obtained the professorship of higher mathematics, which included astronomy, while his colleague Georg Joachim Rheticus took the lower chair. He later served as dean of the college of arts and of philosophy and as rector of the university. With Rheticus he was among the first German scholars to draw attention to Copernicus, whom he called a second Ptolemy in his 1542 Theoricae novae planetarum, though he kept teaching Ptolemaic doctrine and seems to have valued the Copernican model for its mathematics rather than its cosmology. Owen Gingerich identified Reinhold's heavily annotated copy of De revolutionibus in Edinburgh. He catalogued a large number of stars and published astronomical tables.