Philippe van Lansberge

Philippe van Lansberge (1561 to 1632), given in the Wikipedia article as Johan Philip Lansberge and in Latin as Philippus Lansbergius, was a Flemish Calvinist minister, astronomer and mathematician, born in Ghent. He grew up in France and studied in England, moved to the northern Netherlands after the fall of Antwerp in 1585, stayed briefly in Leiden and then became a preacher at Goes, where he lived until 1613. Dismissed that year because he disagreed with a mayoral election, he moved to Middelburg to devote himself to astronomical research until the end of his life. He is best known for his astronomical tables, the Tabulae motuum coelestium perpetuae, used to predict planetary positions, which were later found to contain errors in part because he did not accept the elliptical orbits of Kepler. He supported the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, and his student Martinus Hortensius later collaborated with him.