Low Countries: Notable Scientists, Mathematicians, and Inventors

1514 - 1564 - Andreas Vesalius (All Facts)

• Flemish Anatomist and Physician

  • He is considered the “Father of Modern Anatomy”

  • He was the court physician for King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles

• He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land after he was accused of vivisection

• He died in hunger and fatigue on an island in the Ionian Sea, where he had been thrown by a storm in the Mediterranean on a return journey from the Holy Land

1543 - Andreas Vesalius: On the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books (All Facts)

• Work whose anatomical details were based on numerous dissections performed by the namesake author, many of which were performed on corpses which has been exhumed or taken from gibbets while he was studying in France

• Work which corrected over 200 anatomical errors previously propagated by Galen

• Work on human anatomy which was printed, superbly illustrated, and which became required reading amongst physicians throughout Europe upon and after its publication and greatly advanced the sciences of biology and anatomy

• Work which created controversy amongst physicians in Europe, however, who

  • had mostly taken the work of Galen as definitive

  • were offended by the namesake’s method of obtaining bodies for dissection, which was technically illegal at the time and place in which the namesake author lived

1512 - 1594 - Gerardus Mercator (All Facts)

• Flemish Geographer, Cartographer, and Cosmographer

  • He was a Protestant

  • He fled from the Protestant persecutions in the Low Countries / Netherlands to publish his maps in Duisberg in Germany

• He was famous for having published the first comprehensive map of the known world

  • It was a map in the form of a cylindrical projection showing all the lines of longitude as parallel

  • The map was invaluable to sailors at the time, as it offered a degree of accuracy which was never before available to navigators

• He developed an advanced system of cylindrical projection

  • It worked outwards from the equator and permitted the accurate placing of longitude, latitude, meridians, and parallels

1527 - 1598 - Abraham Ortelius (All Facts)

• Flemish Geographer, Cartographer, and Cosmographer

  • He was from Antwerp in the (Spanish) Netherlands

• He prepared and published history’s first geographical atlas

1548 - 1620 - Simon Stevin (All Facts)

• Flemish Mathematician

  • He rose from being a clerk to being a commissioner of Antwerp’s public works

  • He graduated from Leiden University

• He published his pamphlets “La Thiende” (The Tenth) and “La Disme” (The Decimal), in which he gave an easy-to-understand account of a system of fractions based on tenths

  • He demonstrated that the decimal system beat the method up to that point of counting in twelves

  • He proposed that his method should be in everyday use

  • He proposed that coins could be decimalized, and so, too, could weights and measures