I was very busy today, at least for me. I didn’t have time for any study until evening, when I sat down to look at a copy of Gauss’s Fünfstelliges logarithmisches Tafelwerk that I just received.
No, not that Gauss. This Gauss is Friedrich Gustav Gauss (1829-1915), my great-great-great-grandfather. He was a surveyor for the Prussian government (at that time a very mathematical profession) and later an administrator in the same department. He also published several books of logarithmic tables, one of which was republished in the 1970s in the compact edition shown below.
I tried for quite a while to make sense of the tables in this book. Some of them are dedicated the logarithms of integers and others to the logarithms of trigonometric functions evaluated for particular angles, but that’s about as much as I could understand. The actual values tended not to be what I thought they should, so I was clearly missing a lot. The fact that the book was in German was not that great a hindrance, I don’t think. There was not much explanatory material. The publishers clearly expected the book’s users to be familiar with tables of this kind.
How cool! I’ve sometimes shown students tables of functions out integrals, and they have been shocked that such things existed.
You know, one of the early meanings of the word “computer,” which an old dictionary I own defines as “a person or thing that computes,” was a person who produced tables like that. Perhaps you are descended from a computer.
There were a lot of kinds of tables, it seems. My ancestor also seems to have published trigonometric and “polygonometric” tables. I’d be interested to know what the latter included.