Petrus Apianus

Petrus Apianus, born Peter Bienewitz or Bennewitz in Leisnig in Saxony in 1495 and dead in Ingolstadt in 1552, was a German humanist whose mathematics served the practical sciences of his age: astronomy, navigation, cartography and instrument making. He studied at Leipzig and Vienna, and at Landshut he produced the Cosmographicus liber of 1524, a textbook on astronomy and navigation that went through more than forty reprints in four languages. From 1527 he taught mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt, where he also ran a printing shop. His book on commercial arithmetic of 1527 printed a variation of Pascal's triangle, and in 1534 he published a table of sines. His lavish Astronomicum Caesareum of 1540, with its paper volvelles for calculating dates and planetary positions, won him the favour of Emperor Charles V, who named him court mathematician. In 1531 he recorded that a comet's tail points away from the Sun.