Early science in Cambridge / by R.T. Gunther.

  • Gunther, R. T. (Robert Theodore), 1869-1940.
Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Early science in Cambridge / by R.T. Gunther. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    than at St. John’s. They began in 1712, and were held by John Newcome, Phillip Williams and Caleb Parn- ham (1730), who had been ‘Lector Mathematicus in Per- spectiva’, Arthur Prince (1739)-—the last of the series having been the Rev. J. R. Lunn, who was not replaced, because the University Commission of 1850 confiscated the endowment to make a new Professorship of Mathematics and to augment the stipends of the other existing chairs— a most ‘flagrant act of robbery’ and not in accordance with the desire of the founders. Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy are so generally and so exactly understood, that more than 20 in every year of the Candidates for a Batchelor of Arts Degree are able to demon¬ strate the principal Propositions in the Principia; and most other books of the first Character on those subjects. Nay, several of this number, they tell you, are no strangers to the Higher Geometry and the more difficult parts of the Mathe¬ maticks: and others who are not of this number, are yet well acquainted with the Experiments and Appearances in natural Science. (J. Green, Academic, 1750, p. 23.) An eminent algebraist of this period was baron Francis Maseres (1731-1824), fellow of Clare 1756-9, author of A Dissertation on the Negative Sign in Algebra 1758, who set himself against Saunderson and others, for they rejected negative quantities — 1, and ^J—i, and, as De Morgan aptly puts it, ‘made war of extermination on all that distin¬ guishes algebra from arithmetic’. In this endeavour he was joined by William Trend. Their leading idea ‘seems to have been to calculate more decimal places than any one would want and to reprint the works of all who had done the same thing’ (Astron. Soc. Monthly Notices, v. 148). Maseres publications comprised: 1. Dissertation on the use of the Negative Sign in Algebra. I758- 2. Elements of Plane Trigonometry. 1760. 3. Scriptores Logarithmici, 6 vols. 1701-1807. 4. Doctrine of Permutations and Combinations. 1795. 5. Appendix to Trend’s Principles of Algebra. 1798.