Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, whose surname is also spelled Doppelmayer and Doppelmair, was a German mathematician, astronomer and cartographer, born in Nuremberg on 27 September 1677, the son of a merchant, and dying on 1 December 1750. He entered the Aegidien-Gymnasium in Nuremberg in 1689 and the University of Altdorf in 1696, studied mathematics, physics and jurisprudence, and graduated at Halle in 1698 with a dissertation on the Sun. After two years of travel in Germany, Holland and England he learned to grind his own telescope lenses, and from 1704 until his death he was professor of mathematics at the Aegidien-Gymnasium. He is not noted for discoveries but published on sundials, spherical trigonometry and celestial maps and globes, and wrote a work with biographical information on several hundred mathematicians and instrument makers of Nuremberg. He prepared astronomical plates for the cartographer Johann Baptist Homann, collected in 1742 as the Atlas Coelestis.