Colin Maclaurin was a Scottish mathematician who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. He is also known for being a child prodigy and holding the record for being the youngest professor. The Maclaurin series, a special case of the Taylor series, is named after him.
James Gregory was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. His surname is sometimes spelt as Gregorie, the original Scottish spelling. He described an early practical design for the reflecting telescope – the Gregorian telescope – and made advances in trigonometry, discovering infinite series representations for several trigonometric functions.
Eric Temple Bell was a Scottish-born mathematician and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. He published non-fiction using his given name and fiction as John Taine.
Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson CB FRS FRSE was a Scottish biologist, mathematician and classics scholar. He was a pioneer of mathematical and theoretical biology, travelled on expeditions to the Bering Strait and held the position of Professor of Natural History at University College, Dundee for 32 years, then at St Andrews for 31 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, was knighted, and received the Darwin Medal and the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal.
Marshall Harvey Stone was an American mathematician who contributed to real analysis, functional analysis, topology and the study of Boolean algebras.
John Henry Pratt FRS was a British clergyman, astronomer and mathematician. A Cambridge Apostle, he joined the British East India Company in 1838 as a chaplain and later became Archdeacon of Calcutta. Although nominated as Bishop of Calcutta, the decision was rescinded at the last moment with George Cotton being appointed to the position. A gifted mathematician who worked on problems of geodesy and earth science, he was approached by the Surveyor General of India to examine the errors in surveys resulting from the attraction of the plumb-line to the mass of the Himalayan mountains. This led him to develop a theory based on a fluid earth of crustal balance which became the basis for the isostasy principle. He died in India of cholera while on a visit to Ghazipur.
The Cathedral of St Andrew is a ruined cathedral in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland. It was built in 1158 and became the centre of the Medieval Catholic Church in Scotland as the seat of the Archdiocese of St Andrews and the Bishops and Archbishops of St Andrews. It fell into disuse and ruin after Catholic mass was outlawed during the 16th-century Scottish Reformation. It is currently a monument in the custody of Historic Environment Scotland. The ruins indicate that the building was approximately 119 m (390 ft) long, and is the largest church to have been built in Scotland.
Wendelin Werner is a German-born French mathematician working on random processes such as self-avoiding random walks, Brownian motion, Schramm–Loewner evolution, and related theories in probability theory and mathematical physics. In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory". He is currently Rouse Ball professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
Sir Henry Craik, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish Unionist politician.
Philip KellandPRSE FRS was an English mathematician. He was known mainly for his great influence on the development of education in Scotland.
George Sinclair (Sinclar) (ca.1630–1696) was a Scottish mathematician, engineer and demonologist. The first Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow, he is known for Satan's Invisible World Discovered,, a work on witchcraft, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. He wrote in all three areas of his interests, including an account of the "Glenluce Devil", a poltergeist case from c. 1654, in a 1672 book mainly on hydrostatics but also a pioneering study of geological structures through his experience in coal mines.
Bailie Hugh Blackburn was a Scottish mathematician. A lifelong friend of William Thomson and the husband of illustrator Jemima Blackburn, he was professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow from 1849 to 1879. He succeeded Thomson's father James in the chair of mathematics.
Walter Ledermann FRSE was a German and British mathematician who worked on matrix theory, group theory, homological algebra, number theory, statistics, and stochastic processes. He was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1944.
Prof William Swan FRSE PRSSA LLD was a Scottish mathematician and physicist best known for his 1856 discovery of the Swan band.
Nicolas Vilant FRSE (1737-1807) was a mathematician from Scotland in the 18th century, known for his textbooks. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783.
Events from the year 1756 in Scotland.
Robert Richard Anstice (1813–1853) was an English clergyman and mathematician who wrote two remarkable papers on combinatorics, published the same year he died in the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal. He pioneered the use of primitive roots in this field, anticipating the work of Eugen Netto on Steiner's triplets.
Matthew O'Brien (1814–1855) was an Irish mathematician.
Prof John Edward Aloysius Steggall ARIBA FRSE LLD (1855–1935) was an English mathematician and professor at the University College, Dundee.
Alexander (Alec) Yule Fraser (1857–1890) was a Scottish mathematician, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.
