Adriaan van Roomen

Adriaan van Roomen (1561 to 1615), also known as Adrianus Romanus, was a mathematician, professor of medicine and medical astrologer from the Duchy of Brabant in the Habsburg Netherlands, active across Central Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As a mathematician he worked in algebra, trigonometry and geometry and on the decimal expansion of pi, which he computed to sixteen decimals, surpassing Francois Viete, who had reached ten. He solved the Problem of Apollonius with a new method that intersected hyperbolas, and he wrote on the Gregorian calendar reform. Born in Leuven, he studied at the Jesuit College in Cologne and was professor of mathematics and medicine at Louvain from 1586 to 1592. In 1593 he became the first professor of medicine at the newly refounded University of Wurzburg, and he was ordained a priest in 1604 and later became a canon in Wurzburg. His Mathesis Polemica of 1605 explained the military uses of mathematics.