Roomen

Adriaan van Roomen

Born: 29 Sept 1561 in Louvain, Belgium
Died: 4 May 1615 in Mainz, Germany

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Roomen spent some time with Clavius in Rome in 1585. Professor of mathematics and medicine at Louvain from 1586 to 1592, he then went to Würzburg returning to Louvain until 1610. After this he tutored mathematics in Poland.

Roomen worked on trigonometry and the calculation of chords in a circle, finding pi to 16 decimal places. Viète proposed the problem of drawing a circle to touch 3 given circles to Roomen (the Apollonian Problem) and Roomen solved it using hyperbolas, publishing the result in 1596.

He also wrote a commentary on al'Khwarizmi's Algebra but the only two known copies were destroyed in 1914 and 1944 (as a result of World War I and World War II).

Other Web sites:

Rice University, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. P Bockstaele, Adriaan van Roomen, Nationaal biografisch woordenboek (Brussels, 1966), 751-765. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996