Daniel Kmeth

* Breznóbánya, January 15, 1783 – † Košice, June 20, 1825 / Piarist monk, mathematician, astronomer ; ; He became a member of the Piarist order in November 1799. After completing his probationary year, he taught in Korpona in 1802–1804 and in Kőszeg in 1805. He studied philosophy in Vácott in 1806–1808, and became a doctor of philosophy in Pest. He completed his theology in Nyitra in 1808–1809. He studied astronomy in Vienna in 1810–1812, and in 1812 he was appointed assistant to the director of the Buda Observatory, János Pasquich (1754–1829). The institution was moved to Gellért Hill in 1818. Dániel Kmeth was a diligent and talented observer, and he edited the only major publication of the observatory. He also wrote popular articles for contemporary German newspapers and the Scientific Collection, and initiated the regular publication of weather data. His paper On a New Method of Investigating Cometary Stars was published in the 1823 issue of the Scientific Collection, in which he accused his superior of reporting on the observation of a comet in 1821 based on data obtained from the air. This was probably suggested by the Viennese astronomer Johann Josef Edler von Littrow (1781–1840), who had disagreed with Pasquich a few years earlier and perhaps wanted to put a damper on his work. It is also possible that Dániel Kmeth would have been happy to take the place of his boss, who was already over 65 at the time, and thus wanted to put him in an unpleasant decision-making position. ; He first published the accusation in German a few months earlier in the columns of the Correspodenz Astronomique published in Genoa, and many prominent astronomers of the time, including Friedrich Bessel (1784–1846), Johann Franz Encke (1791–1865), Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840), reacted to this, defending Pasquich and at the same time calling the author of the article an ignorant slanderer. Dániel Kmeth was forced to leave the Buda astronomical observatory and settled in Košice in 1822, where he was appointed as a mathematics and religion teacher at the academy. ; ; His main works: ; Compilation of the Tsillag study in Buda, 1816, ; Observationes astronomicalae, 1821, ; Astronomical Beobachtungen der Zenithdistanzen und gerade Aufsteigungen der Fixedsterne, 1823.