Slovenia 500 Tolarjev2004km# 57  Schön# 57

Jurij Vega As an artillery officer, a specialist in the heaviest mortars, in peacetime he taught mathematics at a special artillery department, introducing mathematical analysis classes and producing a mathematics and physics textbook. He wrote about balloons, land surveying and meteorology, but was most famed for his work on ballistics, becoming one of the first to give the field a scientific basis. He was an inventor, and used mathematics to improve the mechanisms of pendulum clocks. He was a progressive advocate of the metric system, and confusion reigned in this area, it was only three generations later that this system was standardised. His most important work was his logarithmic tables, thanks to which he became a member of several European academies of science. The tables were used for calculations in science, in everyday life and in education all around the world until the introduction of electronic calculators. Using the tables to calculate made a decisive contribution to the rise of mathematics in numerous areas, which in turn made the progress of the scientific and technical revolution faster.