1493 – Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, one of the best-documented early printed books, is published.
The Nuremberg Chronicle is an illustrated biblical paraphrase and world history that follows the story of human history related in the Bible; it includes the histories of a number of important Western cities. Written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel, with a version in German, translation by Georg Alt, it appeared in 1493. It is one of the best-documented early printed books—an incunabulum—and one of the first to successfully integrate illustrations and text.
Latin scholars refer to it as Liber Chronicarum (Book of Chronicles) as this phrase appears in the index introduction of the Latin edition. English-speakers have long referred to it as the Nuremberg Chronicle after the city in which it was published. German-speakers refer to it as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik (Schedel’s World History) in honour of its author.
Production
Two Nuremberg merchants, Sebald Schreyer (1446–1503) and his son-in-law, Sebastian Kammermeister (1446–1520), commissioned the Latin version of the chronicle. They also commissioned George Alt (1450–1510), a scribe at the Nuremberg treasury, to translate the work into German. Both Latin and German editions were printed by Anton Koberger, in Nuremberg.[1] The contracts were recorded by scribes, bound into volumes, and deposited in the Nuremberg City Archives.[2] The first contract, from December, 1491, established the relationship between the illustrators and the patrons. Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff, the painters, were to provide the layout of the chronicle, to oversee the production of the woodcuts, and to guard the designs against piracy. The patrons agreed to advance 1000 gulden for paper, printing costs, and the distribution and sale of the book. A second contract, between the patrons and the printer, was executed in March, 1492. It stipulated conditions for acquiring the paper and managing the printing. The blocks and the archetype were to be returned to the patrons once the printing was completed.[3]
The author of the text, Hartmann Schedel, was a medical doctor, humanist and book collector. He earned a doctorate in medicine in Padua in 1466, then settled in Nuremberg to practice medicine and collect books. According to an inventory done in 1498, Schedel’s personal library contained 370 manuscripts and 670 printed books. The author used passages from the classical and medieval works in this collection to compose the text of Chronicle. He borrowed most frequently from another humanist chronicle, Supplementum Chronicarum, by Jacob Philip Foresti of Bergamo. It has been estimated that about 90% of the text is pieced together from works on humanities, science, philosophy, and theology, while about 10% of the chronicle is Schedel’s original composition.[4]
Nuremberg was one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1490s, with a population of between 45,000 and 50,000. Thirty-five patrician families comprised the City Council. The Council controlled all aspects of printing and craft activities, including the size of each profession and the quality, quantity and type of goods produced. Although dominated by a conservative aristocracy, Nuremberg was a center of northern humanism. Anton Koberger, printer of the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed the first humanist book in Nuremberg in 1472. Sebald Shreyer, one of the patrons of the chronicle, commissioned paintings from classical mythology for the grand salon of his house. Hartmann Schedel, author of the chronicle, was an avid collector of both Italian Renaissance and German humanist works. Hieronymus Münzer, who assisted Schedel in writing the chronicle’s chapter on geography, was among this group, as were Albrecht Dürer and Johann and Willibald Pirckheimer.[2]
1879 – Margherita Piazzola Beloch, Italian mathematician (d. 1976)
Margherita Piazzolla Beloch (July 12, 1879 in Frascati – 1976 in Rome) was an Italian mathematician who worked in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry.
Biography
Margherita was the daughter of the German historian Karl Julius Beloch, who taught ancient history for 50 years at Sapienza University of Rome, and American Bella Bailey. Margherita studied mathematics at the Sapienza University of Rome and wrote her undergraduate thesis under the supervision of Guido Castelnuovo. She received her degree in 1908 with Lauude and “dignita’ di stampa” which means that her work was worthy of publication and in fact her thesis “Sulle trasformazioni birazionali dello spazio” (On Birational Transformations In Space) was published in the Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata. Guido Castelnuovo was very impressed with her talent and offer her the position of assistant which Margherita took and held until 1919, when she moved to Pavia and the successive year to Palermo to work under Michele De Franchis, an important figure of the Italian school of algebraic geometry at the time. In 1924, Beloch completed her “libera docenza” (a degree that at that time had to be obtained before one could become a professor) and three years later she became a full professor at the University of Ferrara where she taught until her retirement (1955).
Scientific Work
Her main scientific interest were algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry. After her thesis she worked on classification of algebraic surfaces studying the configurations of lines that could lie on surfaces. The next step was to study rational curves lying on surfaces and in this framework Beloch obtained the following important result:[1] “Hyperelleptic surfaces of rank 2 are characterised by having 16 rational curves.”
Beloch also made some contributions to the theory of skew algebraic curves.[2] She continued working on topological properties of algebraic curves either planar or lying on ruled or cubic surfaces for most of her life, writing about a dozen papers on these subjects.[3]
Around 1940 Beloch become more and more interested in photogrammetry and the application of mathematics, and in particular algebraic geometry, to it. She is also known for her contribution to the mathematics of paper folding:[4] In particular she seems to have been the first to formalise an origami move which allows, when possible, to construct by paper folding the common tangents to two parabolas. As a consequence she showed how to extract cubic roots by paper folding,[5] something that is impossible to do by rule and compass. The move she used has been called the Beloch fold.[6]
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