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N

John Napier, an eminent mathematician of the 17th century, dis-

covered logarithms. (Photo courtesy of the Science Museum,

London/Topham-HIP/The Image Works)

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Napier, John (Jhone Neper) (1550–1617) British Log-

arithms Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1550 (his exact

birth date is not known), John Napier is remembered in

mathematics for his work on

TRIGONOMETRY

and meth-

ods of computation, most notably for his invention of

LOGARITHM

s.

As was usual at the time, Napier entered the St.

Andrew’s University in 1563 at the age of 13. It is

unlikely that Napier studied mathematics at this insti-

tution, and historians today are unsure by what

means he acquired a working knowledge of the sub-

ject. Napier took an active interest in theology and

published a number of important works on the role of

religion in society. His study of mathematics was only

ever a hobby.

Napier was aware that astronomers at his time

were hampered by the difficulty of doing large compu-

tations by hand, in particular, computing the products

of very large numbers. He sought for a method that

would simplify the process. Using the curious geometri-

cal model of an object moving along a straight segment

of unit length with speed varying according to its dis-

tance from the endpoint, Napier found a formula that

converted problems of multiplication into simpler com-

putations of addition. Today we would say that Napier

worked with the formula: