Wilhelm Schickard

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Wilhelm Schickard (April 22 1592 – October 23 1635) was a German polymath who built one of the first automatic calculators in 1623.

Schickard was born in Herrenberg and educated at the University of Tübingen, receiving his first degree, B.A. in 1609 and M.A. in 1611. He studied theology and oriental languages at Tübingen until 1613. In 1613 he became a Lutheran minister continuing his work with the church until 1619 when he was appointed professor of Hebrew at the University of Tübingen. Schickard was a universal scientist and taught biblical languages such as Aramaic as well as Hebrew at Tübingen. In 1631 he was appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Tübingen. His research was broad and included astronomy, mathematics and surveying. He invented many machines such as one for calculating astronomical dates and one for Hebrew grammar. He made significant advances in mapmaking, producing maps which were far more accurate than those which were previously available at the time. ^[1]

Long before Pascal and Leibniz, Schickard invented a calculating machine in 1623. Contemporaries called his machine the Speeding Clock. It preceded the less versatile Pascaline of Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner by twenty years. Schickard's letters to Johannes Kepler show how to use the machine for calculating astronomical tables. The machine could add and subtract six-digit numbers, and indicated an overflow of this capacity by ringing a bell; to aid more complex calculations, a set of Napier's bones were mounted on it. Schickard's letters mention that the original machine was destroyed in a fire while still incomplete. The designs were lost until the 19th century; a working replica was finally constructed in 1960. Schickard's machine was not programmable. The first design of a programmable computer came roughly 200 years later (Charles Babbage). And the first working program-controlled machine was completed more than 300 years later (Konrad Zuse's Z3, 1941).

Wilhelm Schickard died of the bubonic plague in Tübingen, in 1635.

[edit] Trivia

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• The Schickard crater on the moon is named after Schickard.
• Schickard wrote science fiction stories.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• O'Connor, John J; Edmund F. Robertson "Wilhelm Schickard". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.  
• Wilhelm Schickard, father of the computer age by Juergen Schmidhuber
• Computer history speedup since 1623
• Schickard moon craterbn:ভিলহেল্ম শিকার্ড

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