Joseph Epping (1 December 1835 – 22 August 1894) was a German

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

astronomer and

Assyriologist Assyriology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , ''-logy, -logia''), also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cune ...

Life

Joseph Epping was born at Neuenkirchen near the

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on 1 December 1835. :nl:Exaten His parents died while he was very young, and he owed his early education to relations. After completing the usual Gymnasium at Rheine and at

Münster Münster (; ) is an independent city#Germany, independent city (''Kreisfreie Stadt'') in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also a ...

, he matriculated at the academy in Münster, where he devoted himself particularly to mathematics. In 1859 he entered the novitiate of the

Society of Jesus The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rome. It was founded in 1540 ...

in Münster and after his philosophical studies was appointed professor of mathematics and astronomy at Maria-Laach. He spent the years from 1867 to 1871 in the study of theology and was ordained priest in 1870. Gabriel García Moreno,

President of Ecuador The president of Ecuador (), officially called the constitutional president of the Republic of Ecuador (), serves as the head of state and head of government of Ecuador. It is the highest political office in the country as the head of the exec ...

, had petitioned the General of the Jesuits in the early seventies for members of the Society to form the faculty of the Polytechnicum in

Quito Quito (; ), officially San Francisco de Quito, is the capital city, capital and second-largest city of Ecuador, with an estimated population of 2.8 million in its metropolitan area. It is also the capital of the province of Pichincha Province, P ...

, which he had recently founded. A number of German Jesuits responded to the call, among them Epping, who set out in June, 1872, for Quito to become professor of mathematics. He learned Spanish and wrote a textbook of geometry. The political disturbances which followed the assassination of Moreno (6 August 1875) made it necessary for the Jesuits to return to Europe, and Epping arrived in the Netherlands in the fall of 1876. He spent the remaining years of his life at Blijenbeck, and later at Exaeten, teaching astronomy and mathematics, devoting his leisure to research and literary work. He died at Exaeten, in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

, on 22 August 1894

Works

Epping's first published volume, , appeared in 1882. It was an exposition and critique of the Kant–Laplace

nebular hypothesis The nebular hypothesis is the most widely accepted model in the field of cosmogony to explain the formation and evolution of the Solar System (as well as other planetary systems). It suggests the Solar System is formed from gas and dust orbiting t ...

; and a refutation of the

pantheistic Pantheism can refer to a number of Philosophy, philosophical and Religion, religious beliefs, such as the belief that the universe is God, or panentheism, the belief in a non-corporeal divine intelligence or God out of which the universe arise ...

and materialistic conclusions which had been drawn from it. His most important work, however, was begun in collaboration with who, in connection with his own studies in Assyriology, had induced him to undertake a mathematical investigation of the Babylonian astronomical observations and tables. After considerable labour the key was found. He discovered the table of differences for the

new moon In astronomy, the new moon is the first lunar phase, when the Moon and Sun have the same ecliptic longitude. At this phase, the lunar disk is not visible to the naked eye, except when it is silhouetted against the Sun during a solar eclipse. ...

in one of the tablets, and identified Guttu with

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", because of its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous carbon dioxide () atmosphere. At the average surface level the atmosph ...

, Sakku with

Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 tim ...

, and Te-ut with

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...

(Epping and Strassmaier in , vol. 21, pp. 277–292). Eight years later he published (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1889). This work was of importance both from the standpoint of astronomy and chronology. It contains an exposition of the astronomy of the ancient Babylonians, worked out from their

Ephemerides In astronomy and celestial navigation, an ephemeris (; ; , ) is a book with tables that gives the trajectory of naturally occurring astronomical objects and artificial satellites in the sky, i.e., the position (and possibly velocity) over time. ...

of the moon and the planets. This was supplemented by (, Vol. XXXIX, pp. 229–240). He was also the author of a number of articles in the .

References

*Walter Baumgartner in (Weimar, 1894), appendix IX

Notes

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Epping, Joseph 1835 births 1894 deaths 19th-century German Jesuits 19th-century German astronomers German Assyriologists German male non-fiction writers People from Münster