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William Forster was an English mathematician living in London, a pupil of the celebrated mathematician and astronomer clergyman William Oughtred (1574-1660). He is best known for his book, a translation and edition of Oughtred's treatise entitled The Circles of Proportion. Oughtred invented horizontal and circular forms of the slide rule, and Forster persuaded his master to let him translate his writings about their form and use, and to publish them. The publication resulted in a controversy, because another student of Oughtred's, Richard Delamain the elder, during the two years (1630-32) in which Forster was preparing the book, brought out two treatises on the same subject claiming the inventions as his own, and addressing himself to royal patronage. Forster's work was dedicated to that eminent intellectual, Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), and the account of Oughtred's claim is found in Forster's Preface, or Letter of Dedication. Following the invention or discovery of logarithms by John Napier, in his Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio of 1614, the translation of that work by Edward Wright (1561-1615), and Henry Briggs's Arithmetica Logarithmica of 1624, the development of the slide rule had an important impact on the teaching of mathematics.
Euclid Speidell was an English customs official and mathematics teacher known for his writing on logarithms. Speidell published revised and expanded versions of texts by his father, John Speidell. He also published a book called Logarithmotechnia, or, The making of numbers called logarithms to twenty five places from a geometrical figure in 1688.
For other uses, see Thomas Wright (disambiguation).
References
- ↑ "Henry Sutton". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- 1 2 Jardine, Boris (2008). "The 'incomparable' Mr. Sutton: a famous 17th-century instrument maker". Whipple Collections. Whipple Museum of History and Science. Retrieved 29 October 2016.
- ↑ "Henry Sutton Thinking: a Reading of a New Acquisition - Museum of the History of Science" . Retrieved 27 June 2016.
