Career
Herwart served as chancellor to the Duke of Bavaria, and was regarded by the Bavarian aristocracy as an effective intermediary during the turbulent transition from the reign of Duke Wilhelm V to that of his successor, Maximilian I.
Herwart"s fields as a scholar were astronomy, chronology, mathematics and philology. His work in chronology was admired by Michael Mästlin, among others, and his work in mathematics contributed to the early formulation of logarithms by Joost Bürgi and John Napier. He was also associated with Tycho Brahe, Johannes Praetorius, and Helisaeus Roeslin.
The correspondence was discovered by C. Anschütz at Munich, and was first published in 1886.
A sample exchange, on an astronomical passage from the Neronian poet Lucan, is available online in English translation. In 1610, Herwart published a multiplication table in a folio volume of more than a thousand pages.