The Trigonometric Tables of Georg Joachim Rheticus' Opus Palatinum: The Greatest Computational Effort in the History of Humankind
If one were to ask who put the greatest effort to calculate mathematical tables in the history of mankind, the best answer would be Georg Joachim Rheticus. His highly accurate trigonometric tables contained in “Opus Palatinum” were used until the wake of 20 th century in various fields such as astronomy, geography, surveying , navigation, to name a few. His orginal trigonometric tables, particularly the table of sines, were accurate upto 10 decimal places. But it contained few errors in cotangents, cosecants etc which were later corrected by a mathematician named Bartholomous Pitiscus, who then republished the sine table of Rheticus to 15 decimal places (which he had already calculated, but did not publish). But nothing that was comparable to his trigonometric tables ever existed before and it remained the standard mathematical table for centuries to come. The aim of this presentation is to shed some light on how Rheticus was able to compute such a magnificent table.