Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz

Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (1606 to 1682) was a Spanish Cistercian monk, bishop, scholastic philosopher, polyglot and mathematician, born in Madrid. A precocious student who published astronomical tables as a boy, he studied at Alcala de Henares and Salamanca, worked in the Spanish Netherlands, served at imperial and papal courts, and became bishop of Satriano in 1657 and later of Vigevano. He wrote an enormous number of works on subjects from grammar to theology. In mathematics he is remembered for Mathesis biceps (1670), which set out the representation of numbers in bases other than ten, including base two, and for a form of logarithm that anticipated cologarithms. He died in Vigevano.