Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio, ejusque usus, in utraque trigonometria vt etiam in omni logistica mathematica, amplissimi, facillimi, & ... Ioanne Nepero ... (Latin Edition)
John Napier was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston.
Background
The 6th Laird Alexander Neper, the grandfather of the scientist, died in the tragic for the Scots battle at Pinky (1547), and his castle passed to the eldest son, Archibald, 14, (1534-1608). Two years later, Archibald Napier married Janet Boswell, their son John was born in 1550 in the family castle of Merchiston, which his ancestors erected in the XV century. After John, in the family were born two more children - the youngest son Frances and the daughter Janet. Father Archibald was an educated man, knew Latin well, and from 1576 he led the finances of Scotland (in the post of "Master of the Mint").
Education
As was the common practice for members of the nobility at that time, Napier was privately tutored and did not have formal education until he was 13, when he was sent to St. Salvator's College, St. Andrews. He did not stay in college very long. It is believed that he dropped out of school in Scotland and perhaps travelled in mainland Europe to better continue his studies. Little is known about those years, where, when, or with whom he might have studied, although his uncle Adam Bothwell wrote a letter to John's father on 5 December 1560, saying "I pray you, sir, to send John to the schools either to France or Flanders, for he can learn no good at home," and it is believed that this advice was followed.
Napier devoted most of his leisure to the study of mathematics, particularly to devising methods of facilitating computation, and it is with the greatest of these, logarithms, that his name is associated. He began working on logarithms probably as early as 1594, gradually elaborating his computational system whereby roots, products, and quotients could be quickly determined from tables showing powers of a fixed number used as a base. His contributions to this powerful mathematical invention are contained in two treatises: Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (Description of the Marvelous Canon of Logarithms), which was published in 1614, and Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Constructio (Construction of the Marvelous Canon of Logarithms), which was published two years after his death. In the former, he outlined the steps that had led to his invention.
Logarithms were meant to simplify calculations, especially multiplication, such as those needed in astronomy. Napier discovered that the basis for this computation was a relationship between an arithmetical progression - a sequence of numbers in which each number is obtained, following a geometric progression, from the one immediately preceding it by multiplying by a constant factor, which may be greater than unity or less than unity.
In the Descriptio, besides giving an account of the nature of logarithms, Napier confined himself to an account of the use to which they might be put. He promised to explain the method of their construction in a later work. This was the Constructio, which claims attention because of the systematic use in its pages of the decimal point to separate the fractional from the integral part of a number. Decimal fractions had already been introduced by the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin in 1586, but his notation was unwieldy. The use of a point as the separator occurs frequently in the Constructio. Joost Bürgi, the Swiss mathematician, between 1603 and 1611 independently invented a system of logarithms, which he published in 1620. But Napier worked on logarithms earlier than Bürgi and has the priority due to his prior date of publication in 1614. Although Napier’s invention of logarithms overshadows all his other mathematical work, he made other mathematical contributions. In 1617 he published his Rabdologiae, seu Numerationis per Virgulas Libri Duo (Study of Divining Rods, or Two Books of Numbering by Means of Rods, 1667); in this he described ingenious methods of multiplying and dividing of small rods known as Napier’s bones, a device that was the forerunner of the slide rule.
Early in his career Napier became active for the Protestant cause in politics. Later, he was appointed to the General Assembly as Edinburgh commissioner in 1588, and in 1593 he was a member of two committees named to make demands on the king with regard to the safety of the church and the punishment of the Roman Catholic nobility.
Views
Quotations:
"If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture's purpose was to disclose them."
"Doctrine does matter. But one must ever be reminded that to be right on doctrine does not mean one is right with the Lord."
"We can land men on the moon, but, for all our mechanical and electronic wizardry, we cannot reproduce an artificial fore-finger that can feel as well as beckon."
Connections
In 1572 Napier married Elizabeth Stirling, they had a son Archibald and daughter Joan. In 1579, Elizabeth died, and Napier married again for her second cousin Agnes. In his second marriage he had ten children - five sons and five daughters.