Maria Cunitz or Maria Cunitia (other versions of surname include: Cunicia, Cunitzin,

Life

Birth place and family

Maria Cunitz was born in Wohlau (now Wołów, Poland), as the eldest daughter of a Baltic German, Heinrich Cunitz, a physician and landowner who had lived in Schweidnitz for most of his life, and Maria Scholtz from Liegnitz, daughter of the German scientist Anton von Scholtz (1560–1622), a mathematician and counselor to Duke Joachim Frederick of Liegnitz. Category:Baltic-German people

Sources on her year of birth

The year of Maria's birth is uncertain. No birth, baptism or similar documents have ever been located. The year was speculated about in the first major German-language publication about Maria Cunitz of 1798. Paul Knötel appears to be the first to give the year 1604 as the year of Maria's birth. This date is estimated to be accurate since her parents married the previous year. Other authors later appear to have repeated the same year. The proof that Maria was actually born in 1610 is furnished by an anthology with congratulation poems on her first wedding, in connection with a letter of Elias A Leonibus to Johannes Hevelius from the year 1651, noted by Ingrid Guentherodt. Full details concerning the family of Maria Cunitz have been published by Klaus Liwowsky.

Marriages and interest in science

The family eventually moved to Schweidnitz in Lower Silesia (today Świdnica, Poland). At an early age of 13, Maria married (in 1623) the lawyer David von Gerstmann. After his death in 1626, she married (in 1630) Elias von Löwen, also from Silesia. Elias von Lowen was also known as Elie de Loewen. He was a physician at Pitschen and studied astronomy. Elias von Lowen was Maria's tutor and encouraged Maria to pursue astronomy before their marriage in 1630. Elias and Maria had three sons: Elias Theodor, Anton Heinrich and Franz Ludwig. took refuge in the Cistercians convent of Olobok, Poland.

Cunitz expanded her astronomical tables to include all of the planets at any moment in time.

Urania propitia

Urania propitia is one of the most well known and influential works created by Cunitz. Her cosmology, as exemplified in this work, was a variation of other great, early astronomers such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Urania propitia is a "large quarto with a large number of pages of tables that allows people to determine both the longitude and latitude of each of the planets, also along with other parameters." In this text she revised the complicated and errored calculations found in Kepler's Rudolphine Tables by creating simpler algorithms that reduced the room for human and mathematical error. However, Cunitz did omit small coefficients, leading to minimal errors in Urania propitia. Urania propitia was published in both Latin and German in order to increases its accessibility.

Elias von Lowen, Maria's second husband, created the preface to Urania propitia. Elias wanted to make sure the reader of Urania propitia knew that the entirety of this work was exclusively Maria's own work. Elias also wanted to note that he had no part in writing Urania propitia, but he wanted to make clear the fact that he continuously supported his wife Maria. Although both of Maria's parents were well educated, Maria herself never had any formal education. Despite the negative connotation of teaching women about the natural sciences that often prevailed in 17th century Germany, Heinrich and Mary educated Maria in a multitude of subjects, including mathematics, medicine, history, and the fine arts. Maria could speak in seven languages: German, Italian, French, Polish, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

One of Maria's tutors, Elias von Löven, a physician and amateur astrologist like her father, would later become her second husband. During their marriage Elias encouraged his wife's passion for astronomy and mathematics.

  • 12624 Mariacunitia, a main-belt asteroid discovered at the Palomar Observatory in 1960 is named in honor of her.

Nationality

thumb|Map from 1645 showing places of Cunitz' life in Silesia like Wolaw, Lignitz and Schweidnitz. In those times both German and Slavic names were in use.|alt=

Maria Cunitz is usually characterized as Silesian, for example in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition of 1911. She was born and spent most of her life in the Holy Roman Empire, which included non-German minorities, ruled by the Austrian Habsburg monarchy. The fragment of Silesia in which Maria lived was part of Bohemia before 990, the united Poland between 990 and 1202 and part of Bohemia between 1038 and 1050. In 1202 the Polish seniorate was abolished and all Polish Duchies, including Silesia, became independent, In 1331 the region again became part of Bohemia. In 1742 it became part of Prussia and in 1871 the German Empire. About three centuries after Maria's lifetime it was reassigned to Poland after World War II.

During Maria's lifetime, nationality did not play as significant a role in determining person's identity as it does today. However, the birthplace of Maria Cunitz and the long reaching effects of the Thirty Years War did have a substantial effect on Maria's work. Her time in hiding helped to develop her simplification of the Rudolphine Tables. Nevertheless, multiple later sources felt the need to assign to Maria Cunitz a nationality relevant to their own time. She has mostly been described as German, for example in the Biographical Dictionary of Woman in Science. She published in German. She has been also described as Polish and some

See also

  • Timeline of women in science

References

;Attribution

  • Digital-Library of Wroclaw
  • Hatch, Robert Alan, Web page on Maria Cunitz at University of Florida
  • History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries