Simon von Stampfer

Simon von Stampfer was an Austrian mathematician and surveyor who taught mathematics and physics before becoming professor of practical geometry at the Polytechnic Institute in Vienna. Around 1832 and 1833 he developed the stroboscopic disk, a rotating disk with slots and sequential drawings that created the illusion of motion when viewed in a mirror, and he coined the term stroboscopic from Greek words meaning whirlpool and to look at. His device received an imperial patent in 1833 and was sold commercially, alongside a nearly identical device, the phenakistiscope, developed independently around the same time by the Belgian scientist Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/