1. Baron Jurij Bartolomej Vega was a Slovene mathematician, physicist, and artillery commissioned officer.
14 Facts About Jurij Vega
1. 2.
Jurij Vega was first educated in Moravce and then attended high school for six years at the Jesuit College in Ljubljana, where he studied Latin, Greek, religion, German, history, geography, science, and mathematics.
3.
Jurij Vega was a schoolmate of Anton Tomaz Linhart, the Slovenian writer and historian.
4.
Jurij Vega left Ljubljana five years after graduating and entered military service in 1780, becoming a professor of mathematics at the Artillery School in Vienna.
5.
At the age of 33, Jurij Vega married Josefa Svoboda, a Czech noblewoman from Ceske Budejovice, who was 16 years old at the time.
6.
Jurij Vega participated in battles at Fort Louis, Mannheim, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Kehl, and Diez.
7.
Jurij Vega found and marked some errors in the millions of values Vega had calculated.
8.
Volume I was published in 1782 when Jurij Vega was 28 years old, followed by Volume II in 1784, Volume III in 1788, and Volume IV in 1800.
9.
Jurij Vega submitted this calculation to the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg in his booklet V razprava, in which he identified an error at the 113th decimal place in the previous best estimate by Thomas Fantet de Lagny, which had claimed 127 digits.
10.
Jurij Vega's record held for 52 years, until 1841, and his method remains notable to this day.
11.
Jurij Vega only developed the second term of the series once in his calculations.
12.
In 1781, Jurij Vega advocated for the adoption of the decimal metric system of units within the Austrian Habsburg monarchy.
13.
Jurij Vega was a member of several scholarly societies, including the Academy of Practical Sciences in Mainz, the Physical and Mathematical Society of Erfurt, the Bohemian Scientific Society in Prague, and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
14.
Jurij Vega was an associate member of the British Scientific Society in Gottingen.