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Le père Christophore Clavius (1537–1612). I–III: Sa vie et son œuvre. (French) Zbl 0544.01014

This tripartite paper describes first Clavius’ (1538-1612) life and works. Secondly it discusses his activities as astronomer and thirdly his mathematical achievements. The author gives many interesting informations, but unfortunately there are far more mistakes than there should be.
Thus the enumeration of Clavius’ works on page 57/8 is neither complete nor correct (there are especially many typing errors). It is not true, that only correspondence with Galilei has been published. Though the title repeats three times 1537 as year of birth it is said on page 61 that he is born in 1538 (this date is correct). On page 65 there are three mistakes concerning the dates or the origin of letters. The same is true with the two letters between Clavius and Galilei mentioned on page 192. Clavius’ attitude towards Copernicus is not correctly described (page 182). The same is true with his attitude towards Viète (page 336), because he did not know Viète in 1591, with the number and the wording of the citation from ”La Vérité des sciences” on page 337. It is not true that Clavius calculated \(C^ n_ m\) (page 340), that Leibniz’s treatise ”De arte combinatorie” appeared in 1676 or Guldin’s ”Problema arithmeticum de rerum combinationibus” (not combinatoribus) in 1622. The section p. 344/6 does not belong to the ”Practical Arithmetic”, but to the ”Practical Geometry” and so on. To sum up: The paper can serve as a first introduction but the reader must not rely on its statements.
Reviewer: E.Knobloch

MSC:

01A40 History of mathematics in the 15th and 16th centuries, Renaissance

Biographic References:

Clavius, Ch.
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