Nicholas Mercator

Nicholas Mercator (actually: Nicholas Kauffman, * 1619-1623, but probably in 1620 at Cismar or Eutin; † 4 or January 14 or February 12, 1687 in Paris) was a mathematician and astronomer who with his work on logarithms was known.

He studied in Rostock and suffering and was from 1642 to 1648 Lecturer in Rostock, then from 1648 to 1654 in Copenhagen. From there he went to Paris ( 1655-1657 ). 1657 he moved to England and lived from 1658 to 1682 in London. Here he built a pendulum clock, which allowed more precise measurements at sea for determining longitude. For this he was elected to the Royal Society in 1666. In 1682 he again went to France. He built the fountains of Versailles and died there in 1687.

Mercator discovered the series for the natural logarithm (in his 1668 published work Logarithmo - technica ):