Tilemann Stella

Tilemann Stella, born Tilemann Stoltz in Siegen in 1525 and dead in 1589, was a German mathematician and cartographer. He studied at the Latin school in Siegen and then at Wittenberg, Marburg and Cologne, where mathematicians such as Johannes Dryander and Erasmus Reinhold taught him, and he became a close student of Philipp Melanchthon, who entrusted him with making cartographic representations for biblical studies, among them maps of the Holy Land, the route of the Exodus and Germany. From 1552 Duke John Albert I of Mecklenburg funded his work: he began mapping Mecklenburg, made a celestial globe in 1555 and from 1560 was court mathematician and librarian in Schwerin, where he also planned and supervised a canal between Dömitz and Wismar. After the duke's death in 1576 he worked for the courts of Saxony and Brandenburg-Ansbach.