Valentinus Otho

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

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.

Work

Opus Palatinum de Triangulis
De triangulis globi sine angulo recto libri quinque

External links

Cantor, Moritz: Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Mathematik 1550-1600 Kapitel 68

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Name	Otho, Valentinus
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Date of death	1603
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