Mathematician
John Napier was born in Merchiston Tower in 1550. He was born during one of the most exciting periods of Scottish and European history. Napier was known as the 'Marvellous Merchiston'. This was a title that many people said that he well deserved. He got this title for his "genius and imaginative vision encompassed a number of fields." At the age of thirteen John went into college at St. Salvator's College in St. Andrews. John Napier was a philosopher and a mathematician. He is the inventor of Logarithms and the inventor of the decimal point. He made one of the single greatest advances in the history of mathematicians. It is said "without Napier's work on logarithms it is difficult to imagine how Kepler and Newton could have made th
log 1 does not equal 0 was a major difficulty, which made them to be less convenient for calculations. "Consider two lines AB of fixed length and A'X of infinite length. He also found exponential expressions for trigonometric functions and introduced the decimal notation for fractions. Points C and C"begin moving simultaneously to the right, starting at A and A' respectively with the same initial velocity; C" moves with uniform velocity and C with a velocity which is equal to the distance CB. Napier published a small way to perform multiplication, the Rabdologiae. He explained another method of division and multiplication using metal plates. He thought of it by dynamic analogy. " Napier did not think of logarithms in an algebraic way. Unlike the logarithms today, Napier's were not really to any base but in our "terminology it is not unreasonable to say that they are to base 1/e. Some of his other mathematical contributions were the formulas for mnemonic for formulas used in solving spherical triangles. His work, Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, contained thirty seven pages of "explanatory matter" and ninety pages of tables, "which facilitated the futherment of astronomy, dynamics, and physics. Napier defined A'C"(=y) as the logarithm of BC (=x), that is y=Nap. Napier said that he had the same idea but he suggested that the new table should be constructed with base 10 and with log 1=0. Napier is best know for his invention of logarithms but pther mathematical contributions include mnemonic for formulas used in solving spherical triangles and two formulas known as Napier's analogies.
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