Paul Wittich

Paul Wittich was a Polish mathematician and astronomer from Breslau, now Wroclaw, who anticipated Tycho Brahe's planetary theory and may have influenced Napier. MacTutor gives 1546 as his birth year, a date computed from his university matriculation, and he died in Vienna on 9 January 1586 while working for the Emperor Rudolf II. He matriculated at Leipzig in 1563 and at Wittenberg in 1566, travelled widely as an itinerant tutor, and in 1576 at Frankfurt an der Oder tutored the Scot John Craig. In 1580 he spent four months at Tycho's observatory on the island of Hven, bringing with him Copernican commentaries and semi-geoheliocentric diagrams, and by 1584 he was in Kassel helping to improve the instruments of the observatory of Wilhelm of Hesse. He found how to replace multiplication and division with addition and subtraction using the rules for sines and cosines of sums and differences of angles, a method known as prosthaphaeresis, which Tycho later claimed as his own. Duncan Liddel studied under him at Breslau.