Person: Caramuel, Juan
Juan Caramuel was a Spanish Cistercian who expounded the general principle of numbers to base n pointing out the benefits of some other bases than 10.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Juan was a highly intelligent boy and by the age of twelve he was constructing his own astronomical tables.
- Caramuel was a Cistercian and in his writings he attacked Jansenism, a movement within the Catholic Church which considered itself following the teachings of St Augustus, but was attacked by its opponents, particularly the Jesuits, as having views close to Protestants.
- Caramuel, therefore, found favour with the Jesuits and also from the highly influential Fabio Chigi.
- Caramuel continued to write and publish many works, the most significant being Theologia moralis fundamentalis, praeterintentionalis, decalogica, sacramentalis, canonica, regularis, civilis, militaris Ⓣ(Fundamental moral theology, including the ten commandments and sacramental, regular, civil, military and canonical matters,) (1652).
- When his patron Fabio Chigi was elected pope in April 1655 (becoming Pope Alexander VII), Caramuel seems to have decided that he would be safer in Rome.
- Fabio Chigi, now pope, never quite supported Caramuel with the same enthusiasm following their earlier disagreements.
- However, in Rome Caramuel served as consulter to the Congregation of Rites and to the Holy Office.
- This second edition appeared in 1656, although scholars largely ignore this edition today, knowing that Caramuel's views are more correctly expressed in the first edition.
- Although they did not attack Caramuel personally, leading Jansenists such as Antoine Arnauld and Blaise Pascal were strongly opposed to his views.
- This move appears to have been made by the pope because Caramuel was attracting too much controversy.
- Perhaps the pope warned him to keep his head down, for Caramuel published nothing during his first four years in Satriano.
- 45-48: Caramuel discusses the representation of numbers in radices 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 60 at some length, but gave no examples of arithmetic operations in nondecimal systems (except for the trivial operation of adding unity).
- But after so long, Caramuel was hardly prepared to yield.
- Caramuel's eyesight became poor in the last years of his life but he was able to continue with his duties as bishop.
- We have described many of Caramuel's contributions above but let us end with a few more details.
- Among Caramuel's other scientific work we mention a system he developed to determine longitude using the position of the moon.
Born 23 May 1606, Madrid, Spain. Died 7 September 1682, Milan (now Italy).
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Astronomy, Origin Spain
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
