John Napier (a photo of his portrait is posted later in the article) is a Scottish mathematician, writer and theologian. He gained fame thanks to the creation of the concept of logarithms as a mathematical apparatus for assisting in calculations.
John Napier: biography
Born in 1550 in Merchiston-Castle, near Edinburgh (Scotland), in the family of Sir Archibald Napier and Janet Botwell. At the age of 13, John entered the University of St. Andrus, but his stay there was probably short-lived, and he was left without a higher education.
Little is known about Neper's early life, but it is believed that he traveled abroad, as was customary for the offspring of the Scottish nobility. It is reliably known that by 1571 he had already returned home and spent the rest of his life either in Merchiston or in Gartness. The following year, John Napier married Elizabeth Stirling, who gave birth to a son and daughter. A few years after the death of his wife in 1579, Neper married her relative Agnes. The second marriage brought a couple of ten, daughters and sons equally. After the death of Napier’s father in 1608, he and his family moved to Merchiston Castle in Edinburgh, where he remained until the end of his days.
Theology and Invention
The life of John Napier passed among during acute religious strife. Passionate and uncompromising Protestant in relations with the Roman Church, he did not seek favors and did not do charity work. It is well known that the King of Scotland, James VI, hoped for the accession of Elizabeth I to the English throne, and there was a suspicion that he sought the help of the Catholic Philip II, King of Spain, in order to achieve this goal. The general meeting of the Scottish church, with which Neper was closely associated, asked the king to fight the Catholics, and John three times became a member of the committee, which reported to the king on the welfare of the church and convinced him that it was necessary to bring justice against the enemies of the church of God.
Letter to the king
In January 1594, John Napier turned to the King of Scotland with a letter stating his "A simple explanation of the entire revelation of St. John." The work, which was supposed to be strictly scientific in nature, was designed to have an impact on contemporary events. In it, Neper wrote: “Let the transformation of the universal monstrosity of your country become a constant concern of Your Majesty, and, first of all, Your Majesty’s own home, family and court, as well as cleansing them of all suspicions of papism, atheism and neutrality, about which this Revelation predicts that their number should increase significantly in these last days. ”
The work occupies a prominent place in Scottish church history.
Weapon development
After the publication of The Simple Explanation, he seemed to be engaged in the creation of secret weapons of war. The manuscript collection, now stored at the Lambeth Palace in London, contains a document signed by John Napier. What the Scottish mathematician invented is clear from the list of various devices created by “the grace of God and the work of masters” to protect his country. Among them are two types of incendiary mirrors, part of an artillery gun and a metal chariot, from which shots can be fired through small holes.
Contribution to Math
John Napier devoted his years of life to the study of mathematics, in particular, to the creation of methods for facilitating calculations, the most famous of which is the method of logarithms, which today bears the name of its creator. He began to work on it, probably already in 1594, gradually developing his own computing system in which the roots, products, and quotient of dividing numbers can be quickly calculated using tables of degrees of a fixed number used as the basis.
His contribution to this powerful mathematical tool is presented in two treatises: Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (Description of the Wonderful Canons of Logarithms), published in 1614, and Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Constructio (Creation of the Wonderful Canons of Logarithms), which was printed in two years after the death of the author. In the first work, the Scottish mathematician described the steps that led to his invention.
Simplification of Computing
Logarithms were supposed to simplify the calculations, in particular the multiplication, which was necessary for astronomy. Napier found that the basis for this calculation was the relationship between arithmetic progression - a sequence of numbers, each of which is calculated by geometric progression from the previous one by multiplying it by a constant coefficient greater than 1 (for example, a sequence of 2, 4, 8, 16 ...), or less than 1 (e.g., 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2 ...).
In Descriptio, in addition to describing the nature of the logarithms, John Napier limited himself to listing the scope of their use. He promised to explain the way they are built in a later work. She was Constructio, which deserves attention by the systematic use of a decimal point to separate the fractional part of numbers from the whole. Decimals were already introduced by the Flemish engineer and mathematician Simon Stevin in 1586, but his notation was cumbersome. Constructio often uses a dot as a separator. In 1603–1611, the Swiss mathematician Just Bürgi invented his own logarithm system, which was published in 1620, regardless of the Scottish mathematician. But Neper worked on them before Bürgi and was given priority because of an earlier publication date in 1614.
Rabdology and trigonometry
Although the invention of logarithms by John Napier overshadows all his other works, his contribution to mathematics was not limited to them. In 1617, he published his Rabdologiae, seu Numerationis per Virgulas Libri Duo ("Rabdology, or Two Book of Counting Using Sticks", 1667), in which he described the original methods of multiplying and dividing by small oblong rods, divided by 9 squares transverse lines with printed on them by numbers. These counters, known as Napier's wands, were the forerunner of the slide rule.
He also made an important contribution to spherical trigonometry, in particular by reducing the number of equations used to express trigonometric relations from ten to two. He is also credited with the trigonometric formulas of the Napier analogy, but it is likely that the English mathematician Henry Briggs also participated in their compilation.
John Napier died on April 4, 1617 in Merchiston Castle.