Unsupported Speculation

In my free time, I’ve been studying a book written in 1620 by a Swiss clockmaker named Jost Burgi. The book was called Aritmetische und Geometrische Progreß Tabulen, and written in German, probably because the German language was an academic language in the 1600’s, and a lot of intellectual work was done in German at the time. It was basically one of the first logarithm tables ever constructed which allowed someone to use the table and reduce what would have been a very large multiplication problem into a simple addition problem.

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is that when I went through the process to start at the beginning and reconstruct the same values in the table, I noticed that the numbers in Burgi’s table would suddenly deviate from the numbers I was finding.

Also, I noticed that this tended to happen a few value spaces before the dreaded number 666 would appear in the table, which meant that in Burgi’s table, three 6’s in a row would be caused to be absent.

One of my first thoughts about this is that Jost Burgi might have been a religious paranoid, and was a smidge superstitious about numerology. But, I’ve started to think instead that he might have actually been worried about being turned in to the Catholic Inquisition by some Swiss peasant.

Think about it. He and John Napier both independently developed two different ways to construct tables for reducing very large, complicated, and time consuming multiplication problems into simple addition problems. Johannes Kepler also used Burgi’s tables to greatly speed up his calculations of the positions of the planets in the night sky, because without them, such a calculation would have taken far longer to laboriously perform.

Kepler also wrote this about Burgi: “… as aids to calculation Justus Byrgius was led to these very logarithms many years before Napier’s system appeared; but being an indolent man, and very uncommunicative, instead of rearing up his child for the public benefit he deserted it at birth.”

In other words, Burgi shared his tables with almost no one, didn’t talk about them, printed them in small quantities, and only confided in it with close friends such as Johannes Kepler himself, probably because Kepler was mathematical, and wouldn’t have been aroused to suspicion because of the chance occurrence of three sixes in a row nestled here and there in a table of rows and columns of nine-figure digits.

Think about it this way: The chance of one 6 occurring in one space is 1 in 10, because 6 is one number between 0 and 9. Now the chance of two 6’s occurring back to back is 1 in 100, because the number 66 is one number between 0 and 99. And at last, the chance of three 6’s occurring in a row is 1 in 1000, because, and I’m sure you already get it, the number 666 is one number between 0 and 999.

And so in a table of progressions, which start with a small number, and then additively increase by a fixed interval is a lot like a slot machine of being tortured on the rack if the wrong person sees the dratted number of the beast appear in a book of logarithm tables he purchased in a street market.

This is why I suspect that Jost Burgi was just far too busy with his clock making to be bothered by a group of narrow-eyed priests banging on his door because someone tipped them off about a pamphlet of the devil’s work being distributed throughout Western Christendom. This is why he might have gone to great and tedious lengths to scan line after line of his own table in its original form, and created an alternative version to release publicly that numerically danced lightly away from the triple six of his own doom whenever it was about to occur.

The terrible scenario he was probably trying to avert was having to defend himself, over and over again, to the eternal dissatisfaction a bunch of scary people that were drawn more to theology than to the maths, and then discovered their calling as the judiciary swords and scales of Christ.

And this explains why he was uncomfortable talking about it.