Michael Stifel was a mid-40s fairly known monk, personal friend of Martin Luther, and a 'wiz-kid' at mathematics.
At some point, he decided that the Bible held a 'numbers-secret' and that you could predict the end of the world on a certain date (19 October 1533). In fact, he even said it would occur precisely at 8 AM (German time).
A fair number of Germans at the time, at least around the Annaburg area of Saxony-Anhalt, believed the prediction.
As days and week passed (after 19 October), the trust dissolved.
After a while, in the region of Saxony-Anhalt, they had this saying....if you needed to calculate something that made no sense, 'you need to think like a Stifel' would be uttered (for sarcasm effect).
On the positive side? Stifel was pretty persuasive on the idea of negative numbers. At the time, Church authorities made it blunt that negative numbers could not exist (you couldn't get less than zero). By keeping the topic going.....it would eventually be accepted negative numbers are just as valuable as positive numbers.
2 comments:
Sheesh, imagine how far we'd be by now without the religious dark ages. Over 1000 years of progress lost.
Hard to say we were better off with Roman leadership continuing on, or Catholic dark ages in this era. Imagine if the Germanic tribes had gone onto Rome and sacked it after 9 AD (with that victory at the Teutoburg Forest area)....ensuring Rome never was a major power.
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