Bartholomaeus Pitiscus

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"Pitiscus" redirects here. For the crater, see Pitiscus (crater). For the scholar, see Samuel Pitiscus.

Bartholomaeus (Barthélemy, Bartholomeo) Pitiscus (August 24, 1561 – July 2, 1613) was a German trigonometrist, astronomer, and theologian.

Pitiscus was born to poor parents in Grünberg (Zielona Góra) in Silesia and studied theology at Zerbst and at Heidelberg. A Calvinist, he was appointed to teach the ten year-old Frederick IV, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, by Frederick's Calvinist uncle John Casimir, as Frederick's father had died in 1583. Pitiscus was subsequently appointed court chaplain at Breslau (Wrocław) and court preacher to Frederick. Pitiscus supported Frederick's subsequent measures against the Roman Catholic Church.

Pitiscus achieved fame with his influential work Trigonometria: sive de solutione triangulorum tractatus brevis et perspicuus (Heidelberg; first edition, 1595), 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 (1614 and 1619).

Pitiscus edited Thesaurus mathematicus (1613) in which he improved the trigonometric tables of Georg Joachim Rheticus and also corrected Rheticus’ Magnus Canon doctrinæ triangulorum.

Pitiscus died in Heidelberg. The lunar crater Pitiscus is named after him.

In a letter to his son dated September 27, 1748, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, makes reference to Pitiscus, calling him a "learned pedant": "I dipped accidentally, the other day, into Pitiscus's preface to his Lexicon, where I found a word that puzzled me, and which I did not remember ever to have met with before. It is the adverb 'praefiscine', which means, IN A GOOD HOUR; an expression which, by the superstition of it, appears to be low and vulgar. I looked for it: and at last I found that it is once or twice made use of in Plautus, upon the strength of which this learned pedant thrusts it into his preface."[1]

The classical scholar Samuel Pitiscus (1637-1727) was his nephew.