Juana Luisa Vega Montecino

Some characteristic forenames: Spanish Jose, Juan, Luis, Carlos, Manuel, Jesus, Miguel, Rafael, Francisco, Angel, Ramon, Jorge.

Spanish: topographic name from vega ‘fertile plain or lowland; water meadow’ (of pre-Roman origin, probably originally denoting irrigated land), or a habitational name from any of numerous places called (La) Vega. Compare De la Vega and De Vega .

History: Surname Vega is most famous for the Spanish playwright, poet, and novelist Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (1562–1635). But another notable bearer of this surname was not Spanish: Jurij Vega (1754–1802) was a Slovenian mathematician, physicist, and artillery officer of the Austrian army, author of Thesaurus Logarithmorum Completus ‘Treasury of all Logarithms’ (first edition published in 1794, 90th edition in 1924), after whom the crater Vega on the Moon is named. His surname, which he adopted as an adult, was neither Spanish nor Slovenian: it was an altered form of his original surname Veha (from veha ‘lingerer’ or from a homonymous word meaning ‘bung’, i.e. the stopper in the bunghole of a cask, by extension ‘drunkard’), of which he was the last known male bearer.