Background
Craig was born in 1663, in Hoddam, Scotland. Little is known of Craig’s early life, even the place of his birth is not known with certainty.
Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, United Kingdom
Craig was educated at the University of Edinburgh.
mathematician scientist theologian
Craig was born in 1663, in Hoddam, Scotland. Little is known of Craig’s early life, even the place of his birth is not known with certainty.
Craig was educated at the University of Edinburgh.
Craig lived in an age that was witnessing spectacular advances in the development of mathematics. The Royal Society, of which Craig was elected a fellow in 1711, had already, under the guidance of Newton, established itself as one of the foremost scientific societies in Europe; and its members included many who were to leave their mark upon the progress of mathematics. Living in an age of such intellectual giants, Craig was rarely able to tower above his contemporaries; this is scarcely to be wondered at when it is recalled that they included Leibniz, Johann I and Jakob I Bernoulli, Halley, Moivre, Hooke, and Cotes.
Nevertheless, Craig was unusually gifted, and his writings covered a wide range. He had been received into holy orders, becoming in 1708 prebendary of Salisbury; and he made contributions of value to his adopted profession. It is, however, for his contributions to mathematics that he deserves to be remembered.
Of the vast fields that were thrown open to mathematicians at the close of the seventeenth century, none proved richer than the newly invented calculus; and it was to the extension and application of this that the mathematicians of the period directed their attention. Newton had outlined his discovery in three tracts, the first of which, De analysi per aequationes numero infinitas, although it did not appear until 1711, was compiled as early as 1669, and was already known to a number of his contemporaries. Meanwhile, Leibniz had contributed to the Acta eruditorum for October 1684 his famous paper “Nova methods pro maximiset minimis, itemque tangentibus… et singulare proillis calculi genus.” For a time the new methods appear to have made surprisingly little impact upon English mathematicians, possibly because when Newton’s monumental Principia first appeared (1687), there was scarcely any mention of the calculus in its pages; thus, it might well be thought that the calculus was not really necessary. On the Continent, however, Leibniz’ great friends, the Bernoullis, lost no opportunity of exploring the new methods. Of the few Englishmen who realized the vast possibilities of the tool that had been placed in their hands, none showed greater zeal than did Craig
Apart from a number of contributions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Craig compiled three major works: “Method of Determining the Quadratures of Figures Bounded by Curves and Straight Lines” (1685), “Mathematical Treatise on the Quadratures of Curvilinear Figures” (1693), and “On the Calculus of Fluents” (1718), with a supplement, “De optica analytica.”
His work was poorly received. Several later mathematicians complained about his imprecise use of probability and the unsupported derivation of his formula. Stephen Stigler, in his 1999 book (see references, below) gave a more favorable interpretation, pointing out that some of Craig's reasoning can be justified if his "probability" is interpreted as the log-likelihood ratio.
Nothing is known of Craig's family.