Jurij Vega

Baron Jurij Bartolomej Vega, born Vehovec, was a Slovene mathematician, physicist and artillery officer, born on 23 March 1754 in the village of Zagorica east of Ljubljana and dead on 26 September 1802. He studied at the Jesuit College in Ljubljana, became a navigational engineer in 1775, and in 1780 entered military service as professor of mathematics at the Artillery School in Vienna. He published volumes of logarithmic tables, the first in 1783, and his most significant work, the Thesaurus Logarithmorum Completus of 1794, corrected numerous errors in the tables of Adriaan Vlacq; Gauss used it often. He commanded mortar batteries at the siege of Belgrade in 1788 and fought against French revolutionary forces from 1793 to 1797.