The European Scientist

On June 16, 1754, the birth of the second son of its leading physician was registered in the "Militärmatriken" of the Invalides' Hospital at Pest, Hungary. The father was Joseph Zach from Olmütz and the mother Clara née Sontag. The son received the name Joannes Franciscus Xaverius Vitus Fridericus, and later became a geodesist and astronomer. For these professions, he acted around 1800 not only as a kind of international information centre, but he moreover stimulated the work of the other colleagues and carried out important observations and reductions. He studied and published historical sources, and his journals constitute themselves more an ocean than a source of the history of our science, an ocean which is still to be explored for as yet undetected islands. At the occasion of the 250 birthday of Franz Xaver von Zach, Hungarian colleagues took the initiative to commemorate him by a symposium at the seat of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This book contains contributions that are based on lectures given at the Budapest symposium "The European Scientist".