Nikolaus Mercator

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Nicholas (Nikolaus) Mercator (s. 1620, Holstein – 1687, Versailles), juga dikenal dengan nama Jermanik Kauffmann, adalah seorang matematikawan abad ke-17. Ia lahir di Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, Jerman dan dididik di Rostock dan Leyden. Setelah itu, ia menetap di Belanda dari 1642 sampai 1648. Ia mengajar di Universitas Kopenhagen pada 1648–1654 dan menetap di Paris dari 1655 sampai 1657.

Dalam bidang matematika, ia dikenal karena membuat risalah berjudul Logarithmo-technia tentang logaritma, terbitan tahun 1668. Dalam risalah tersebut, ia mendeskripsikan seri Mercator, yang juga ditemukan secara terpisah oleh Gregory Saint-Vincent:

$\ln(1+x)=x-{\frac {1}{2}}x^{2}+{\frac {1}{3}}x^{3}-{\frac {1}{4}}x^{4}+\cdots .$

Karya

• 1676: Institutionum astronomicarum, London (1685, Padua)
• Kinkhuysen (1661) Algebra ofte Stelkonst, translated by N. Mercator, appears 1968 in Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton II: 295–364 with Newton commentary 364–446.
• 1664: Hypothesis astronomica nova, London
• 1666: "Certain problems touching some points of navigation", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1: 215–18
• 1668: Logarithmo-technia from HathiTrust or Logarithmtechnia from Internet Archive
• Wallis (1668) Review of Logarithmotechnia, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 3: 753–9, followed by "Some further Illustration" by N. Mercator, pp 759–64.
• 1670: "Some considerations … method of Cassini", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 5: 1168–75.

Referensi

• Euclid Speidel (1688) Logarithmotechnia: the making of numbers called logarithms from Google Books
• Francis Maseres & Charles Hutton (1791) Scriptores Logarithmici, link from Google Books.
• Benjamin Wardhaugh (July 2010) A Plague of Ratios from Mathematics Association of America
• John Aubrey (1813) Letters and Lives of Eminent Men II: 450,1, 473

Pranala luar

• Some Contemporaries of Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, and Huygens: N. Mercator
• John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson. Nikolaus Mercator di MacTutor archive.