Talk:Michael Stifel

Additional info

There is significant amounts of information on Michael Stifel in Howard Eves "An Introduction the the History of Mathematics" between pages 270 and 272 if anyone has the time to properly add and cite it. Hcir614 (talk) 01:34, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

" The German saying "to talk a Stiefel" or "to calculate a Stiefel" (Stiefel is the German word for boot) meaning to say or calculate nonsense can be traced back to this incident.[1] " Michael Stifel, as well as other persons at this time, was worried about the end of the world. However he believed in his calculations, and got on a wrong track. He was so courageous to forecast the end of the world within his lifetime. At the incident at Lochau then, Michael Stifel lost all his property as well. From current point of view, this entry, promoting a rare oral german saying, is a verbal "derailment"and insult. Could this saying be explained a bit more friendly. Thanks --(Jo ha st (talk) 21:51, 22 June 2014 (UTC))

Copyright problem removed

One or more portions of this article duplicated other source(s). The material was copied from: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Stifel.html. Infringing material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 15:58, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

the idiom "to calculate a boot" can not traced back to Michael Stifel

The idiom to calculate a "boot / Stiefel" can be traced back to Michael Stiefel is not proven... see below translated entry talk/discussion from german Wikipedia

There is no historical evidence for this sentence: "The German saying "to talk a Stiefel" or "to calculate a Stiefel" (Stiefel is the German word for boot), meaning to say or calculate something based on an unusual track, can be traced back to this incident."

So it is recommended to remove this entry mentioned above in English Wikipedia as well.

Thanks

translated comment talk/discussion from german Wikipedia:

3.592 The idiom "to calculate a boot" Last comment: 6 years ago EN 7 no longer exists; Gr. Retti's database has been deleted. Furthermore, it cannot be definitively stated that the idiom "to calculate a boot" or "to talk a boot" originates from the Stiefel affair. That is incorrect. Regarding "to talk a boot," "to drink a good boot," "to talk or preach a boot," Constantin von Wurzbach (1862, Historical Words, Proverbs and Idioms..., Issue 3, p. 328) refers to: Some attempted to derive the proverb [meaning "to talk a boot"] from that weather-maker and prophet, Michael Stiefel (1528), who proclaimed the end of the world but was greatly shamed for his blather. Wurzbach, however, provides an alternative example: Charles XII of Sweden. However, Wurzbach emphasizes the "dimension" (sic) of drinking around which the sayings are grouped. In the works of the Viennese Franz Seraph Hügel and especially Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander in 1876, the suggestion of "boot" is entirely absent. Most notably, the supposedly proverbial phrase "to calculate a boot" is completely absent from the entire 19th and early 20th centuries. On the other hand, there were countless schoolbooks that vividly illustrated tricky arithmetic problems using boots, simply because of their paired nature. Or, for example, in an 1851 elementary school reader, there is the story "The Expensive Boots," whose price gradually increases from one thaler to eight due to the protagonist's mathematical errors. Even in a penny magazine article from around 1850 about Michael Stifel, which commented humorously, ironically, but not uninformedly, on Stifel's calculations of the end of the world, there is no mention of the supposedly traditional phrase "to calculate a boot," which would have been quite obvious in this context. There are other examples as well. Similarly, the originally purely drinking and commemorating song "Stiefel(e) muss sterben, ist noch so jung, so jung // Ach wenn das Absatz wüßt', dass Stiefel(e) sterben müßt' ..." (Boot must die, is still so young, so young // Oh, if only the heel knew, that Stiefel(e) sterben müßt' ..." (Boot must die...), was only attributed in August 1872 to the fact that it was probably written by Wittenberg students as a mocking song about a "city pastor Magister Stiefel" (City Pastor Magister Stiefel). This quirky report was reprinted many times by entertainment and humor magazines, even verbatim by the music journal "Euterpe." But that, too, is an invented tradition, dating back to 1872, no less. If we are to believe the retrospective account of a present-day pastor from his youth, he was confronted with the saying ("You're counting a boot!") orally at a school in the 1960s. Since this expression—correct me if I'm wrong—was apparently very common regionally in Swabia decades ago, the author of the written claim may well be Karl Moersch, *Bei uns im Staate Beutelsbach – vom unbekannten Württemberg* (In our state of Beutelsbach – from unknown Württemberg), 1984, p. 132. Indeed, it is striking how, since the mid-1980s and increasing in frequency up to the present day, and accompanied by a certain local patriotism in the media, it has been claimed that the saying arose, in a sense, as an echo of Stifel's failed prediction of the end of the world. To make a long story short: You can't go backwards from the recent present into (cultural) history and establish "things" that are completely undocumented; that's ahistorical. A minor historical detail, sure, it doesn't hurt anyone, but it's quite characteristic and not that uncommon. Above all, it promotes one thing: provincialism—and perhaps also the respective city's marketing. --Imbarock (Discussion) 18:38, 19 Apr 2019 (CEST) Jo ha st (talk) 12:28, 8 April 2026 (UTC)