Simon Stevin – Stevinus Lunar Crater and Asteroid 2831 Stevin – Bruges, Belgium
Posted by: 
dtrebilc
N 51° 12.394 E 003° 13.365
31U E 515560 N 5672819
Simon Stevin (1548 – 1620) was a Flemish mathematician and military engineer. He was active in a great many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical.
Waymark Code: WMFKJX
Location: West-Vlaanderen, Belgium
Date Posted: 10/30/2012
Views: 14
The Statue
The statue stands in a small square that was named after him in 1827. The statue was sculpted by Eugene Simonis and it was intended to unveil it on July 26th 1846. However he took longer to sculpt than was intended and a temporary bronze pained plaster sculpture was used for the unveiling ceremony.
The statue shows Simon pointing to a document with a mathematical method for calculating the balance of forces on inclined planes, known as the "Epitaph of Stevinus".
Simon Stevin was unusual for his time in that when he wrote books and articles he used his native Dutch language rather than Latin. He wanted to make his subjects more accessible to the average person especially in the area of accounting and interest calculations for business use.
He was interested in many different subjects and published many books. Although he didn’t invent the use of decimals to replace fractions he helped to popularise their use. He didn’t invent the use of the decimal point however, that was introduced at a later date.
The Lunar Crater
Stevinus is a lunar impact crater located in the southeast part of the Moon. It has a diameter of 75 kilometres and is 3 kilometres deep and has 13 smaller satellite craters.
Stevinus has a high inner wall and a central peak at the midpoint of the interior floor. The inner walls are slumped, so that the side slopes down sharply, then more gradually. There are several small ridges on the floor, in addition to the peak. Stevinus is from theCopernican period, which lasted from 1.1 billion years ago until the present.
A picture of the crater can be seen
here.
Asteroid 2831 Stevin
The
asteroid is a main belt asteroid and was discovered by
Hendrik van Gent a Dutch astronomer based at Johannesburg in 1930. He discovered a total of 39 asteroids, most of which, if not all have some sort of Dutch connection in their name. In this case the connection is Stevin’s use of Dutch rather than Latin in his published documents.