Valentinus Otho

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Valentinus Otho or Valentin Otto (born around 1550 possibly in Magdeburg - 1603 in Heidelberg) was a German mathematician and astronomer.

[edit] Life

In 1573 he came to Wittenberg, proposing to Johannes Praetorius an approximation of Pi as $\pi \approx \tfrac {355} {113}$ .

In 1575 he supported Georg Joachim Rheticus in his trigonometric tables. The next year they went to Kaschau in Hungary where Rheticus died. Thus, Otho inherited the De revolutionibus manuscript of Nicolaus Copernicus that Rheticus had published in 1543 in Nuremberg.

Otho became Professor for astronomy in Wittenberg, but when the rulers of Saxony did not support the tables, he moved to Heidelberg where Elector Friedrich IV sponsored the '’Opus Palatinum de Triangulis’’ in 1596.