Bartholomaeus Pitiscus

Who was Bartholomaeus Pitiscus?

Bartholomaeus Pitiscus was a 16th-century German trigonometrist, astronomer and theologian who first coined the word Trigonometry.

Pitiscus was born to poor parents in Grünberg in Lower Silesia, the part of Austrian-ruled Duchy of Glogau. He studied theology in Zerbst and Heidelberg. A Calvinist, he was appointed to teach the ten year-old Frederick IV, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, by Frederick's Calvinist uncle Johann Casimir of Simmern, as Frederick's father had died in 1583. Pitiscus was subsequently appointed court chaplain at Breslau and court preacher to Frederick. Pitiscus supported Frederick's subsequent measures against the Roman Catholic Church.

Pitiscus achieved fame with his influential work written in Latin, called Trigonometria: sive de solutione triangulorum tractatus brevis et perspicuus, which introduced the word "trigonometry" to the English and French languages, translations of which had appeared in 1614 and 1619, respectively. It consists of five books on plane and spherical trigonometry. Pitiscus is sometimes credited with inventing the decimal point, the symbol separating integers from decimal fractions, which appears in his trigonometrical tables and was subsequently accepted by John Napier in his logarithmic papers.