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How a numerical table with 5,400 entries became the world's calculator for the next 350 years.
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Credits:

Written, recorded, edited by Ben Syversen
Illustrations: Kendall Eddy
Character animation for introduction: Alex Zepherin

Thanks to Mostafa Hasan for his last minute help with the layout and details of my thumbnails.
Thanks to Emily Zhang and David Liu for additional help.
Special thanks to Stephen Welch for sharing his Kepler resources with me.
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‪@WelchLabsVideo‬'s series on Kepler is amazing and does a far more thorough treatment of the math behind the story of Kepler’s discovery of Mars’s orbit than I do here. Take a look (his two videos on Burgi’s red and black numbers and Napier’s logarithms are also excellent):
   • How the Bizarre Path of Mars Reshaped Astr...  
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More useful videos:

   • The History of the Natural Logarithm - How...  
   • How people came up with the natural logari...  
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Recommended Reading:

•Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens - Kitty Ferguson
•Kepler - Max Caspar
•The Daring Invention of Logarithm Tables: How Jost Burgi, John Napier, and Henry Briggs Simplified Arithmetic and Started the Computing Revolution - Klaus Truemper
•John Napier: Life, Logarithms, and Legacy - Julian Havil

Full list of sources and credits: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k...
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Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:42 - 1) Kepler and Tycho
05:08 - 2) Arithmetica Integra
07:12 - 3) Kepler and Tycho cont'd
12:10 - 4) Burgi
16:51 - 5) Napier
22:25 - 6) Kepler Reads Napier
24:35 - 7) Briggs
25:34 - 8) The Rudolphine Tables
26:41 - 9) The Age of the Logarithm

Images are public domain via Wikimedia; music from Epidemic Sound

This video was sponsored by 80,000 Hours.

Correction:
09:56 This is a typo. It should read: Astrology is the "foolish little daughter" of respectable astronomy.