"Two... Swiss mathematicians of the 17th century deserve mention,—one a genius, the other a plagiarist. The genius was Jobst Bürgi, from 1579 to 1603 court watchmaker to Landgraf Wilhelm IV of Hesse, and later (until 1622) to Kaiser Rudolph II. He wrote on the proportional compasses and on astronomy, but is best known for his invention of logarithms independently of Napier. He was led to the idea by an entirely different route from that taken by the latter, approaching it through the theory of exponents. He did not publish anything upon the subject until after Napier had made known his discovery, and when he finally concluded to print his work it was in the form of a small table of antilogarithms, issued anonymously at Prag in 1620. The book never attracted any attention and remained practically unknown except to historians of mathematics."