Daniel Huber

Daniel Huber was a Swiss mathematician and astronomer, born in Basel on 23 June 1768 and dying there on 3 December 1829. He came from a distinguished Basel academic family, studied classical philology and medicine at the University of Basel, and was appointed professor of mathematics there in 1792, then director of the university library in 1802 and chancellor in 1804. His research covered observational astronomy, including studies of comets, and problems in optics, and from 1815 he took part in the trigonometric surveys of Basel. In 1817 he founded the Natural Sciences Society of Basel. From 1789 until his death he kept one of the longest early instrumental weather records in Switzerland, logging more than thirty thousand measurement times with up to ten barometers and thermometers and becoming the first Swiss observer to use a centigrade thermometer regularly. The digitized series now helps climate studies of the Year Without a Summer and the late Little Ice Age.