Re: Jakob Bartsch / Bartschius / Barschius

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Claudio Antonini:] Jakob Bartsch and Georgius
    > Baresch/Bartsch/Barschius could not be one and the same.
    
Of course not. 

Yet, for all we know at this point, Georgius's last name could have
been Bartsch, so he may have been a relative of Jakob --- uncle,
cousin, or even an elder brother.

Even if there was no relation ,if Jakob ever set foot in Prague, he
may have known Georgius -- surely they had common friends among the
local intellectuals.

Until Rene cares to puncture this balloon, we can have fun inventing
new fancy stories for the manuscript. Like, Kepler borrows it from
Rudolf's library and takes it to Sagan in 1629; when Kepler dies in
1630, Jakob gets to keep it; when Jakob dies in 1633, he wills the VMS
to dear uncle Georgius in Prague...

    > ... [Georgius] attended 'La Sapienza' in Rome in 1605

So GB was at least 12-15 years older than JB...

    > and wrote a letter to Athanasius Kircher in ... 1639
    
... so he was at most 40 years older than JB.

    > Sources to look for info: ... Universitate Sapientiae Romanae
    > http://??? (list of alumni 1600 to 1610?)

I saw somewhere on the Internet that their archives have some 100,000
volumes, and are severely understaffed. So even if the information is
there, it may not be easy to find...

Anyway, last week I mailed a letter asking about GB to prof. Giorgio
Stabile, the chair of History of Science at la Sapienza. If anything
comes out of it, I will let you know...

All the best,

--stolfi

(BTW, by coincidence, that same Prof Stabile made headlines in Italian
newspapers recently when he discovered that the now-ubiquitous "@"
sign, in Italian "chiocciolina" or "little snail", was used by 15th
Venetian merchants as a symbol for "amphora", a unit of weight. He
also noted that the Spanish (and Portuguese) name of that unit was
"arroba". Indeed, I myself learned that "@" was a symbol for "arroba"
(about 15 kg) at school, back in the pre-computer days -- and the name
"arrobinha" is still occasionally used for that symbol around here.)