Maria Cunitz (Wołów, Silèsia, 1610 – Byczyna, Silèsia, 1664)

“Having thus far explained in the first part the properties of the first motion, by which, according to even the rudest perceptions of any man, the stars apparently move from east to west in a diurnal revolution (circumgyratione), and the considerations arising from that, I now undertake the second motion, which may GOD cause to succeed, or the motion belonging to the planets, by which (they move), not from east to west, but clearly in the opposite direction, slowly from west to east, and according to the sense perception only of assiduous observers, each one of them born in its own degree of slowness and swiftness. Which (second motion), since it is subject to so many and such great irregularities in longitude and latitude, and the calculation of it subject to the perplexities of so many cautions, to the accumulations, prone to error, of so many corrections, mean motions, anomalies, is so exceedingly difficult that it has deterred very many of ability, otherwise well versed in those things which take place by the first motion, from further progress in this science. I was entirely under the guidance of my husband in this: in order that the greatest part of those difficulties be removed as far as was possible, I would devise a particular method, the most concise and clear, for discovering those insidious digressions in the motion of the planets. Therefore, preserving the given quantities (didomenis) of the RUDOLPHINES in all the planets, by concentration to the point of exhaustion, I computed in an entirely new form this second part of the tables that I now impart to the astrophile”.

Fragmento de: Maria Cunitz, Urania Propitia (1650).

Para conocer más:

Noel Swerdlow, “Urania Propitia, Tabulae Rudophinae faciles redditae a Maria Cunitia Beneficent Urania, the Adaptation of the Rudolphine Tables by Maria Cunitz”. En: Jed Z. Buchwald (ed.), A Master of Science History: Essays in Honor of Charles Coulston Gillispie , London: Springer, 2010, pp. 81-121.

Palabras de Mujeres de Ciencia 2018:  https://goo.gl/6i372B