WILLIAM OUGHTRED

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction 1

CHAPTER

I. Oughtred’s Life 3

At School and University 3

As Rector and Amateur Mathematician 6

His Wife 7

In Danger of Sequestration 8

His Teaching 9

Appearance and Habits 12

Alleged Travel Abroad 14

His Death 15

II. Principal Works 17

Clavis mathematicae 17

Circles of Proportion and Trigonometrie 35

Solution of Numerical Equations 39

Logarithms 46

Invention of the Slide Rule; Controversy on Priority of Invention 46

III. Minor Works 50

IV. Oughtred’s Influence upon Mathematical Progress and Teaching 57

Oughtred and Harriot 57

Oughtred’s Pupils 58

Oughtred, the “Todhunter of the Seventeenth Century” 60

Was Descartes Indebted to Oughtred? 69

The Spread of Oughtred’s Notations 73

V. Oughtred’s Ideas on the Teaching of Mathematics 84

General Statement 84

Mathematics, “a Science of the Eye” 85

Rigorous Thinking and the Use of Instruments 87

Newton’s Comments on Oughtred 94

Index 97

INTRODUCTION

In the year 1660 the Royal Society was founded by royal favor in London, although in reality its inception took place in 1645 when the Philosophical Society (or, as Boyle called it, the “Invisible College”) came into being, which held meetings at Gresham College in London and later in Oxford. It was during the second half of the seventeenth century that Sir Isaac Newton, surrounded by a group of great men—Wallis, Hooke, Barrow, Halley, Cotes—carried on his epoch-making researches in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. But it is not this half-century of science in England, nor any of its great men, that especially engage our attention in this monograph. It is rather the half-century preceding, an epoch of preparation, when in the early times of the House of Stuart the sciences began to flourish in England. Says Dr. A. E. Shipley: “Whatever were the political and moral deficiencies of the Stuart kings, no one of them lacked intelligence in things artistic and scientific.” It was at this time that mathematics, and particularly algebra, began to be cultivated with greater zeal, when elementary algebra