According to the jury, the motif by artist Florian Huhoff impresses with “its mathematical gesture, which conveys the theme well” and the “rational precision” of the depiction. At the center is the schematized historical calculating machine, on which functional connections such as the gear mechanism are staged on the side in the style of a diagram. The successful typography - the theme of the coin in sans serif capitals, the name of the scientist and the year of invention in an antique font - also contributes to the attractive appearance of the coin. The value side also follows the design and arrangement of the elements on the motif side in strong congruence.
Wilhelm Schickard was born in Herrenberg in 1592. From 1610 he studied theology at the University of Tübingen and became a professor of Hebrew there in 1619. In addition to his teaching activities, he was interested in astronomy and in 1631 he also became a professor in this field. Schickard was a very versatile scientist. He created the first precise map of Württemberg, a Hebrew language school that was still in use long after his death, and various mechanical constructions, such as the Rota Hebraea for reading the conjugation of Hebrew verbs and a hand planetarium that shows the movement of the sun, earth and... Moon illustrated and could even be switched between heliocentric and geocentric representation.
The central mechanism of his calculating machine is an adding and subtracting machine for up to six-digit numbers. It consists of six gears with the numbers 0 to 9, each of which is firmly connected to an underlying gear that only has a single tooth. This ensures that when you change from 9 to 0 and vice versa, the adjacent number wheel rotates forward or back by exactly one digit. There is also support for the small multiplication table in the form of rollers with Napier calculators, so that the machine is also suitable for multiplication and division. In 1957, the Tübingen philosophy professor Bruno Baron von Freytag-Loeringhoff managed to reconstruct the machine. Replicas of the machine can now be found in the Tübingen City Museum, in the Computer Museum of the Wilhelm Schickard Institute, in the Center for Data Processing at the University of Tübingen and in the German Museum, among others.
