Klaus Truemper

The book The Construction of Mathematics: The Human Mind’s Greatest Achievement includes creation of tables of the logarithm function by the Swiss craftsman, engineer, and mathematician Jost Bürgi around 1600 CE, with delayed publication in 1620. The book includes the title page of Bürgi’s tables, then explains that the black numbers of the inner ring are on a logarithmic scale.

Due to that feature, two copies of that ring of numbers can be arranged in nested fashion depict a circular slide rule.

Bürgi did not realize this, or rather, there is no evidence that he did. Instead, William Oughtred invented the circular slide rule two years later, in 1622.

We couldn’t rest until we had implemented the circular slide rule based on Bürgi’s title page. For an authentic look, we created with Photoshop two differently sized copies of the black ring of numbers of Bürgi’s title page. The resulting rings were encased in Lexan and connected by a center bolt. It is fun to multiply and divide numbers by rotating the inner, smaller disk, all the time thinking that this is based on the work of genius done almost 400 years ago.

Our book Effective Logic Computation was first published in 1998 by Wiley. The company transferred the copyright back to us in 2002. Using templates developed earlier by G. Rinaldi and F.-S. Sun, we then created an ebook revised edition that could, and still can, be downloaded free of charge. Just check the Internet for websites offering the book.

We now have re-released the revised edition in a low-cost print version. In some sense it is a companion book of the Matroid Decomposition book. Indeed, the theory of logic computation developed in the book relies on various concepts of matroid theory, in particular matroid decomposition. For details about the book, see the More Books page.