A Brill Calendar: June 6

Few surnames are more common in German-speaking regions than ‘Müller’.

Matched by the Christian name ‘Johann’ – also cherished in past ages –it results in a full name less eclectic than most others; the English version is: ‘Miller, John’.

Within this legion of individuals, one Johann Müller (born June 6 1436 at Königsberg, Archbishopric of Mainz, passing away in Rome, July 6 1476) can’t have appreciated the chance of being confused with anyone of his many namesakes and had himself called ‘Regiomontanus’ instead, a Latinized title which stood for the name of his birth-place.

In the ledgers of scholarship, this particular Johann Müller is a ‘rara avis’. Encyclopaedic surveys list Regiomontanus as mathematician and astronomer; but he was much more. Matriculating at Leipzig University in 1447 and moving to Vienna five years later to study under the mathematician Georg von Peuerbach, he started to assist his aging Master in the study of Ptolomaic astronomy, to discover soon that Latin translations from the Arabic bristled with errors. When von Peuerbach died, Regiomontanus adopted his teacher’s fascination and went to Rome.

After the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, many Byzantine scholars had assembled there in a diaspora, their luggage comprising a wealth of salvaged Greek manuscripts and texts. It is seldom that a mathematician, then only 26 years old, takes the trouble to learn an unknown language in order to revive a near enough forgotten science, dealing with interesting properties of triangles and trigonometry. In Regiomontanus’ day & age, a sensible articulation of scholarly knowledge and erudition into separate disciplines had yet to be discovered.

C. P. Snow’s famous 20th century essay on ‘Two Cultures’, surveying the nature and consequences of the communication gap between sciences and humanities, would have been a ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ in the 15th century.