Leonty Magnitsky

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Leonty Filippovich Magnitsky (Russian: Леонтий Филиппович Магницкий) (June 9, 1669, Ostashkov – October 19, 1739, Moscow) was a Russian mathematician and educator.

Leonty Magnitsky was born into a peasant family. According to some accounts, he graduated from the Slavic Greek Latin Academy in Moscow. Starting from 1701 and until his death, Leonty Magnitsky taught arithmetic, geometry, and trigonometry at Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (becoming its director in 1716). In 1703, Magnitsky wrote his famous Arithmetic (Арифметика; 2,400 copies), which would be used as the principal textbook on mathematics in Russia until the middle of the 18th century (Mikhail Lomonosov was himself taught by this book, which he called the "gates to his own erudition"). This book was rather an encyclopedia of mathematics than a textbook due to the fact that most of its content was communicated for the first time in Russian literature. In 1703, Leonty Magnitsky also produced a Russian edition of Adriaan Vlacq's log tables called Таблицы логарифмов и синусов, тангенсов и секансов (Tables of Logarithms, Sines, Tangents, and Secants). The legend has it that Leonty Magnitsky was nicknamed Magnitsky by Peter the Great, who considered him a "people's magnet" (магнит, or "magnit" in Russian).