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John Napier
John Napier

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Acknowledgements

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary (not subject to Creative Commons licensing) and used under licence. See terms and conditions.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following:

Course image: Kim Traynor [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] in Wikimedia made available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.

Figure 1 Bodleian Library

Figure 2 Keele University, Turner Collection

Figure 7 Deutsches Museum, Munich

The material acknowledged below is contained in The History of Mathematics – A Reader (1987) J Fauvel and J Gray (eds), published by Macmillan Education in association with The Open University. This text forms part of the course material for MA290 Topics in the history of mathematics. Copyright © in the editorial selection The Open University.

Reading 1 – Nicolas Chuquet on exponents: tr. and ed. H.G. Flegg, C.M. Hay, B. Moss, Nicolas Chuquet Renaissance Mathematician, Reidel, 1985, p. 144, 151-153, published in Chapter 7 ‘Mathematics in Mediaeval Europe’;

Reading 2 – Proposition 1 of On Spirals: Chapter ‘Archimedes and Apollonius’;

Reading 3 – William Lilly on the meeting of Napier and Briggs: Mr Lilly’s History of his Life and Times, London, 1715, pp. 105-106, published in ‘William Lilly on the meeting of Napier and Briggs’, Chapter 8 ‘Mathematical Sciences in Tudor and Stuart England’;

Reading 4 – Clifford Truesdell on Euler: Chapter ‘Euler and his Contemporaries’;

Reading 5 – John Napier’s Preface: A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithms, preface R.E. Wright, London, published in ‘John Napier’s Preface to A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithms’, Chapter 9 ‘Mathematical Sciences in Tudor and Stuart England’;

Reading 6 – Charles Hutton on Johannes Kepler’s construction of logarithms: C. Hutton, Mathematical Tables: … to which is prefixed, a large and original history of the discoveries and writings relating to those subjects; …, London 1785, 1822 edition, pp. 49-54, published in ‘Charles Hutton on Johannes Kepler’s construction logarithms’, Chapter 9 ‘Mathematical Sciences in Tudor and Stuart England’.

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