Daniel Santbech
Dutch mathematician and astronomer
Daniel Santbech (fl. 1561) was a Dutch mathematician and astronomer. He adopted the Latinized name of Noviomagus, possibly suggesting that he came from the town of Nijmegen, called Ulpia Noviomagus Batavorum by the Romans.
In 1561, Santbech compiled a collected edition of the works of Regiomontanus (1436–1476), De triangulis planis et sphaericis libri quinque (first published in 1533) and Compositio tabularum sinum recto, as well as Santbech's own Problematum astronomicorum et geometricorum sectiones septem. It was published in Basel by Henrich Petri and Petrus Perna.
Santbech's work consisted of studies on astronomy, sundials, surveying, and levelling for water courses. It also includes descriptions of astronomical instruments, information for navigators and geographers, and general information about astronomy in the first years after Nicolaus Copernicus.
Santbech also studied the subject of gunnery and ballistics as a theoretic discourse as well as for the practical application of war, and utilized the foundations of geometry, with ample references to Euclid and Ptolemy, in order to do so. Santbech seem not to have been aware of similar studies by Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia.[1]
Santbech's text included theoretical illustrations of trajectories. These were depicted with abruptly acute angles and straight lines, allowing him to create a right-angled triangle from which ranges were computed with the help of a table of sines.
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This entry incorporates text from “Daniel Santbech” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.