John Napier (a photo of his portrait is posted later in the article) is a Scottish mathematician, writer and theologian. He became famous for creating the concept of logarithms as a mathematical tool to help with calculations.
John Napier: biography
Born in 1550 at Merchiston Castle, near Edinburgh, Scotland, to Sir Archibald Napier and Janet Bothwell. At the age of 13, John entered the University of St. Andrews, but his stay there was probably short-lived, and he was left without a higher education.
Of Napier's early life, little is known, but it is believed that he traveled abroad, as was the custom among the offspring of the Scottish nobility. It is 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 a daughter. A few years after his wife's death in 1579, Napier married her relative Agnes. The second marriage brought the couple ten children, 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 took place among during acute religious strife. A passionate and uncompromising Protestant in relations with the Roman Church, he did not seek favors and did not engage in charity. It is well known that King James VI of Scotland hoped for the accession of Elizabeth I to the English throne, and it was suspected that he sought the help of the Catholic Philip II, King of Spain, to achieve this goal. The general meeting of the Scottish church, with which Napier was closely associated, asked the king to fight the Catholics, and John became three times a member of the committee that reported to the king on the welfare of the church and urged him that justice should be done against the enemies of the church of God.
Letter to the King
In January 1594, John Napier wrote to the King of Scotland in which he formulated his "Simple Explanation of the Whole Revelation of Saint John". The work, which was supposed to be strictly scientific, was calculated to have an impact on contemporary events. In it, Napier wrote: “Let the transformation of the universal enormity of your country be the constant concern of Your Majesty, and, first of all, Your Majesty of your own home, family and court, as well as purifying them from all suspicions of papism, atheism and neutrality, of which it is Revelation foretells that their number is to increase greatly in these last days.”
The work features prominently in Scottish ecclesiastical history.
Weapons development
After the publication of "Simpleexplanations," he seems to be engaged in the creation of secret weapons of war. The manuscript collection, now held at 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 their country. Among them are two types of incendiary mirrors, part of an artillery piece, and a metal chariot that can fire shots through small holes.
Contribution to mathematics
John Napier devoted years of his life to the study of mathematics, in particular, to the creation of methods to facilitate calculations, the most famous of which is the method of logarithms, which today bears the name of its creator. He began working on it, probably as early as 1594, gradually developing his computing system, in which roots, products, and quotients of numbers can be quickly calculated using tables of powers of a fixed number used as a base.
His contribution to this powerful mathematical tool is set out in two treatises: Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio ("Description of the wonderful canons of logarithms"), published in 1614, as well as Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Constructio ("Creation of the wonderful canons of logarithms"), which was published two years after the death of the author. In the first paper, the Scottish mathematician described the steps that led to his invention.
Simplify calculations
Logarithms should haveto simplify calculations, in particular multiplication, which was necessary for astronomy. Napier discovered that the basis for this calculation was the relationship between an arithmetic progression - a sequence of numbers, each of which is calculated by a geometric progression from the previous one by multiplying it by a constant factor greater than 1 (for example, the sequence 2, 4, 8, 16 …), or less 1 (e.g. 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2…).
In Descriptio, in addition to describing the nature of logarithms, John Napier limited himself to listing the scope of their use. He promised to explain the way they were constructed in a later work. It was Constructio, which deserves attention for its systematic use of the decimal point to separate the fractional part of numbers from the integer. Decimals had already been introduced by the Flemish engineer and mathematician Simon Stevin in 1586, but his notation was cumbersome. It is common in Constructio to use a dot as the separator. The Swiss mathematician Just Bürgi independently invented his own system of logarithms between 1603 and 1611, which he published in 1620. But Napier worked on them before Bürgi, and priority was given to him due to the earlier publication date in 1614.
Rhabdology and Trigonometry
Although John Napier's invention of logarithms outshines all his other work, his contribution to mathematics was not limited to them. In 1617 he published his Rabdologiae, seu Numerationis per Virgulas Libri Duo ("Rabdology, or Two Books of Counting withsticks", 1667), in which he described the original methods of multiplication and division by small oblong rods, divided by transverse lines into 9 squares with numbers printed on them. Known as Napier's sticks, these counting devices were the forerunners of the slide rule.
He also made important contributions to spherical trigonometry, in particular by reducing the number of equations used to express trigonometric ratios 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 was also involved in their compilation.
John Napier died on April 4, 1617 at Merchiston Castle.
