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Information about Wilhelm Schickard

Wilhelm Schickard
Wilhelm Schickard (April 22 1592 – October 23 1635) was a German polymath who built one of the first automatic calculators in 1623.

Schickard was born in Herrenberg and educated at the University of Tübingen, receiving his first degree, B.A. in 1609 and M.A. in 1611.[1] He studied theology and oriental languages at Tübingen until 1613. <ref name="thcp" /> In 1613 he became a Lutheran minister continuing his work with the church until 1619 when he was appointed professor of Hebrew at the University of Tübingen. <ref name="thcp" /> Schickard was a universal scientist and taught biblical languages such as Aramaic as well as Hebrew at Tübingen. <ref name="thcp" /> In 1631 he was appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Tübingen. <ref name="thcp" /> His research was broad and included astronomy, mathematics and surveying. <ref name="thcp" /> He invented many machines such as one for calculating astronomical dates and one for Hebrew grammar. <ref name="thcp" /> He made significant advances in mapmaking, producing maps which were far more accurate than those which were previously available at the time. <ref name="thcp" />

Long before Pascal and Leibniz, Schickard invented a calculating machine in 1623. Contemporaries called his machine the Speeding Clock. It preceded the less versatile Pascaline of Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner by twenty years. Schickard's letters to Johannes Kepler show how to use the machine for calculating astronomical tables. The machine could add and subtract six-digit numbers, and indicated an overflow of this capacity by ringing a bell; to aid more complex calculations, a set of Napier's bones were mounted on it. Schickard's letters mention that the original machine was destroyed in a fire while still incomplete. The designs were lost until the 19th century; a working replica was finally constructed in 1960. Schickard's machine was not programmable. The first design of a programmable computer came roughly 200 years later (Charles Babbage). And the first working program-controlled machine was completed more than 300 years later (Konrad Zuse's Z3, 1941).

Wilhelm Schickard died of the bubonic plague in Tübingen, in 1635.

Trivia

  • The Schickard crater on the moon is named after Schickard.
  • Schickard wrote science fiction stories.

References

1. ^ History of Computing Foundation. William Shickard entry at The History of Computing Project. Retrieved on 2007-07-19.

External links

April 22 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events

  • 1500 - Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral becomes the first European to sight Brazil.

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15th century - 16th century - 17th century
1560s  1570s  1580s  - 1590s -  1600s  1610s  1620s
1589 1590 1591 - 1592 - 1593 1594 1595

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Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
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October 23 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events


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9th century - 10th century
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Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
Art - Literature - Music - Science

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polymath (Greek polymathēs, πολυμαθής, "having learned much")[1][2] is a person with encyclopedic, broad, or varied knowledge or learning.
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Herrenberg is a town in the middle of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, about 30km south of Stuttgart and 20km from Tübingen. After Sindelfingen, Böblingen and Leonberg, it is the fourth largest town in the district of Böblingen.
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Pascalina or the Arithmetique, in 1645, the first being that of Wilhelm Schickard in 1623.

Pascal began work on his calculator in 1642, when he was only 19 years old.
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Blaise Pascal (pronounced [blɛːz paskal]), (June 19 1623 – August 19 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father.
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Born July 1 (June 21 Old Style) 1646
Leipzig, Electorate of Saxony
Died November 14 1716
Hannover, Hanover
Nationality German
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Staffelwalze / Step Reckoner (aka the Stepped Reckoner), a device that, as well as performing additions and subtractions, could multiply, divide, and evaluate square roots by a series of stepped additions.
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Johannes Kepler

A 1610 portrait of Johannes Kepler by an unknown artist
Born November 27 1571(1571--)
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Napier's bones are an abacus invented by John Napier for calculation of products and quotients of numbers. Also called Rabdology (from Greek ραβδoς [rabdos], rod and λóγoς [logos], word).
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Charles Babbage FRS (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer who originated the idea of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum.
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Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse in 1992
Born June 22, 1910
Berlin, German Empire
Died December 18, 1995
Hünfeld, Germany
Residence Germany
Field Computer Science
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Z3 was the first working programmable, fully automatic machine, whose attributes, with the addition of conditional branching, have often been the ones used as criteria in defining a computer.
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Bubonic Plague
Classification & external resources

Yersinia pestis'' seen at 2000x magnification with a fluorescent label. This bacterium, carried and spread by fleas, is the cause of the various forms of the disease plague.
ICD-10 A 20.
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Tübingen
Tübingen Altstadt from the St. Georg Stift.
Coat of arms Location

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Schickard is a lunar impact crater of the form called a walled-plain. It lies in the southwest sector of the moon, near the lunar limb. As a result the crater appears oblong due to foreshortening.
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The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive is an award-winning website maintained by John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson and hosted by the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
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Jürgen Schmidhuber (born 1963 in Munich) is a computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, universal Artificial Intelligence (AI), artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low-complexity art.
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