Henry Briggs (mathematician)

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Henry Briggs (February 1561–January 26, 1630) was an English mathematician notable for changing Napier's logarithms into common/Briggesian logarithms.

He was born at Warley Wood, near Halifax, in Yorkshire, England. He entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1577, and graduated in 1581. In 1588, he was elected a Fellow of St. John's. In 1592 he was made reader of the physical lecture founded by Dr Thomas Linacre; he would also read some of the mathematical lectures as well. During this period, he took an interest in navigation and astronomy, collaborating with Edward Wright. In 1596, he became first professor of geometry in the recently founded Gresham College, London; he would lecture there for nearly 23 years, and would make Gresham college a center of English mathematics, from which he would notably support the new ideas of Johannes Kepler. At this time, Briggs obtained a copy of Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, which fired his imagination- in his lectures at Gresham College he proposed the alteration of the scale of logarithms from the hyperbolic 1 / e form which John Napier had given them in his tract, to that in which unity is assumed as the logarithm of the ratio of ten to one; and soon afterwards he wrote to the inventor on the subject. Briggs was active in many areas, and his advice in astronomy, surveying, navigation, and other activities like mining was frequently sought. Briggs at this time invested in the London Company , suggesting he was fairly well-off.

In 1616 Briggs visited Napier at Edinburgh in order to discuss the suggested change to Napier's logarithms. The following year he repeated his visit for a similar purpose. During these conferences the alteration proposed by Briggs was agreed upon; and on his return from his second visit to Edinburgh, in 1617, he published the first chiliad of his logarithms. In 1619 he was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, and resigned his professorship of Gresham College in July 1620. Soon after his settlement at Oxford he was incorporated master of arts.

In 1622 he published a small tract on the Northwest Passage to the South Seas, through the Continent of Virginia and Hudson's Bay; and in 1624 his Arithmetica Logarithmica, in folio, a work containing the logarithms of thirty thousand natural numbers to fourteen decimal places (1-20,000, and 90,000 to 100,000). He also completed a table of logarithmic sines and tangents for the hundredth part of every degree to fourteen decimal places, with a table of natural sines to fifteen places, and the tangents and secants for the same to ten places; all of which were printed at Gouda in 1631 and published in 1633 under the title of Trigonometria Britannica; this work was probably a successor to his 1617 Logarithmorum Chilias Prima ("Introduction to Logarithms"), which gave a brief account of logarithms and a long table of the first 1000 integers calculated to the 14th decimal place. Briggs discovered, in a somewhat concealed form and without proof, the binomial theorem.

Briggs was buried in the chapel of Merton College, Oxford. Dr Smith, in his Lives of the Gresham Professors, characterizes him as a man of great probity, a contemner of riches, and contented with his own station, preferring a studious retirement to all the splendid circumstances of life.

[edit] Bibliography

A Table to find the Height of the Pole, the Magnetical Declination being given (London, 1602, 4to)
"Tables for the Improvement of Navigation", printed in the second edition of Edward Wright's treatise entitled Certain Errors in Navigation detected and corrected (London, 1610, 4to)
A Description of an Instrumental Table to find the part proportional, devised by Mr Edward Wright (London, 1616 and 1618, 12rno)
Logarithmorum Chilias prima (London, 1617, 8vo)
Lucubrationes et Annotationes in opera posthuma J. Neperi (Edinburgh, 1619, 4to)
Euclidis Elementorum VI. libri priores (London, 1620. folio)
A Treatise on the North-West Passage to the South Sea (London, 1622, 4to), reprinted in Samuel Purchas's Pilgrims, vol. iii. p. 852
Arithmetica Logarithmica (London, 1624, folio)
Trigonometria Britannica (Goudae, 1663, folio)
two Letters to Archbishop Henry Usher
Mathematica- ab Antiquis minus cognita.

Some other works, as his Commentaries on the Geometry of Peter Ramus, and Remarks on the Treatise of Longomontanus respecting the Ouadrature of the Circle have not been published.