Person: Kulik, Jakob Philipp
Jakob Kulik was a Ukranian-born mathematician who wrote textbooks on mathematics and mechanics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Kulik entered the competition and was judged the best applicant, worthy of a professorship.
- Kulik donated over 1000 books to help rebuild the collection at the University in the town of his birth where he had studied.
- Kulik is best known, however, for producing numerous mathematical tables including an unpublished table of divisors of integers consisting of 4212 pages.
- Perhaps some of the tables which Kulik intended for this larger publication were contained in his next volume which was published in 1825, namely Divisores numerorum decies centena millia non excedentium.
- Kulik's most impressive work, however, if one is just thinking about the sheer magnitude of the task, was his unpublished tables of factors.
- He did publish a description of the unpublished tables in 1860 and, in 1866, Józeph Petzval also described Kulik's tables.
- The incorrectness of this assertion is demonstrated by an analysis of the manuscript materials including the unknown auxiliary computations made by Kulik.
- A description of Kulik's methods of computation is also given, and documents are referred to which substantiate the hypothesis that Kulik was helped in his work by collaborators.
- Meanwhile, we also give the basic dates for the rest of the tables (especially of trigonometric functions) deposited in Kulik's Nachlass in Vienna.
- The manuscript of Kulik's tables of divisors is essentially useless beginning with the third volume; the second volume, which has been lost, could perhaps tell us more about the real value of the manuscript.
- Other work by Kulik which we have not mentioned above includes: "Theorie und Tafeln der Kettenlinie" Ⓣ(Theory and tables for the catenary) (1832); Untersuchungen über die Kettenbrückenlinie Ⓣ(Studies of the cables of the Chain Bridge) (1838); and Über die Tafel primitiver Wurzeln Ⓣ(Tables of primitive roots) Ⓣ(On the layout of primitive roots) (1853).
- In particular Kulik gave strong support and in the year after the Society was founded he donated a large part of his extensive library of mathematics books to the Society.
Born 1 May 1793, Lemberg, Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine). Died 28 February 1863, Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic).
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Astronomy, Origin Ukraine
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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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
