Adriaan van Roomen

Adriaan van Roomen is often known by his Latin name Adrianus Romanus. After studying at the Jesuit College in Cologne, Roomen studied medicine at Louvain. He then spent some time in Italy, particularly with Clavius in Rome in 1585.

Roomen was professor of mathematics and medicine at Louvain from 1586 to 1592, he then went to Würzburg where again he was professor of medicine. He was also "Mathematician to the Chapter" in Würzburg. From 1603 to 1610 he lived frequently in both Louvain and Würzburg. He was ordained a priest in 1604. After 1610 he tutored mathematics in Poland.

One of Roomen's most impressive results was finding p to 16 decimal places. He did this in 1593 using 2³⁰sided polygons. Roomen's interest in p was almost certainly as a result of his friendship with Ludolph van Ceulen.

Roomen proposed a problem which involved solving an equation of degree 45. The problem was solved by Viète who realised that there was an underlying trigonometric relation. After this a friendship grew up between the two men. Viète proposed the problem of drawing a circle to touch 3 given circles to Roomen (the Apollonian Problem) and Roomen solved it using hyperbolas, publishing the result in 1596.

Roomen worked on trigonometry and the calculation of chords in a circle. In 1596
Rheticus's trigonometric tables Opus palatinum de triangulis were published, many years after Rheticus died. Roomen was critical of the accuracy of the tables and wrote to Clavius at the Collegio Romano in Rome pointing out that, to calculate tangent and secant tables correctly to ten decimal places, it was necessary to work to 20 decimal places for small values of sine, see [2]. In 1600 Roomen visited Prague where he met Kepler and told him of his worries about the methods employed in Rheticus's trigonometric tables.

Among other contributions made by Roomen was one to figures of equal perimeter. Pappus had proved a number of results concerning the maximum area of polygons of equal perimeter. For example regular n-sided polygons have the maximum area amomg all n-sided polygons of fixed perimeter. Roomen generalised the results of Pappus and, again showing his presise thinking, realised that 'regular' had not been properly defined. His work in this area is discussed in detail in [4].

Roomen also wrote a commentary on al-Khwarizmi's Algebra but the only two known copies were destroyed in 1914 and 1944 (as a result of World War I and World War II).

Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

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JOC/EFR December 1996	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
The URL of this page is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Roomen.html