as a supplement to Sacrobosco's textbook, from which this part of the subject had been omitted, but in part also as a treatise of a higher order; but he was hindered in both undertakings by the badness of the only available versions of the Almagest—Latin translations which had been made not directly from the Greek, but through the medium at any rate of Arabic and very possibly of Syriac as well (cf. § 56), and which consequently swarmed with mistakes. He was assisted in this work by his more famous pupil John Müller of Königsberg (in Franconia), hence known as Regiomontanus, who was attracted to Vienna at the age of 16 (1452) by Purbach's reputation. The two astronomers made some observations, and were strengthened in their conviction of the necessity of astronomical reforms by the serious inaccuracies which they discovered in the Alfonsine Tables, now two centuries old; an eclipse of the moon, for example, occurring an hour late and Mars being seen 2° from its calculated place. Purbach and Regiomontanus were invited to Rome by one of the Cardinals, largely with a view to studying a copy of the Almagest contained among the Greek manuscripts which since the fall of Constantinople (1453) had come into Italy in considerable numbers, and they were on the point of starting when the elder man suddenly died (1461).
Regiomontanus, who decided on going notwithstanding Purbach's death, was altogether seven years in Italy; he there acquired a good knowledge of Greek, which he had already begun to study in Vienna, and was thus able to read the Almagest and other treatises in the original; he completed Purbach's Epitome of Astronomy, made some observations, lectured, wrote a mathematical treatise[1] of considerable merit, and finally returned to Vienna in 1468 with originals or copies of several important Greek manuscripts. He was for a short time professor there, but then accepted an invitation from the King of Hungary to arrange a valuable collection of Greek manuscripts. The king, however, soon
- ↑ On trigonometry. He reintroduced the sine, which had been forgotten; and made some use of the tangent, but like Albategnius (§ 59 n.) did not realise its importance, and thus remained behind Ibn Yunos and Abul Wafa. An important contribution to mathematics was a table of sines calculated for every minute from 0° to 90°.
