Yakov Kulik

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Yakov Kulik attended the law and philosophy faculties of Lvov University. He graduated in 1814 and then taught at a High School while he continued to work for his doctorate. He received his doctorate in 1822, then, from 1826, he was Professor of Mathematics at the Charles University of Prague until his death in 1863.

In 1848 the library of the University of Lvov was destroyed by fire and Kulik donated over 1000 books to help rebuild the collection at the University in the town of his birth where he had studied.

Kulik wrote texts on mathematics and mechanics, for example publishing Lehrbuch der höheren mechanik in 1846. He also published Der transcendjährige Kalender. Kulik produced numerous mathematical tables including an unpublished table of divisors of integers consisting of 4212 pages. Kulik did publish a description of the unpublished tables in 1860 and, in 1866, Petzval also described Kulik's tables.

In [3] Howard Eves states that Kulik's greatest achievement was the construction of these factor tables:-

His as yet unpublished manuscript is the result of a twenty-year hobby, and covers all numbers up to 100,000,000.

Similar statements are made in many other books, see for example [2]. Kulik's manuscripts are kept in the archives of the Viennese Academy of Sciences, and Novy has studied them and has written [5] to correct false statements about them such as the one by Eves above:-

... the manuscript of Kulik's tables of divisors is essentially useless beginning with the third volume; the second volume, which has been lost, could perhaps tell us more about the real value of the manuscript.

Kulik's methods of calculating his tables and other manuscripts left by Kulik are, however, very interesting and are discussed in [5].

Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

JOC/EFR © December 1997 Copyright information	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
The URL of this page is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kulik.html