John Nepper: biography, years of life. What did John Naper invent?

John Nepper (a photo of his portrait is placed further in the article) is a Scottish mathematician, writer and theologian. He gained fame due to the creation of the concept of logarithms as a mathematical apparatus for aid in calculations.

John Nepper: Biography

He was born in 1550 in Merchiston-Castle, near Edinburgh (Scotland), in the family of Sir Archibald Napier and Janet Botwell. At the age of 13, John entered the University of St. Andrus, but his stay there was probably short-lived, and he was left without a higher education.

On the early life of Napier little is known, but it is believed that he traveled abroad, as was customary in the offspring of the Scottish nobility. It is well 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 daughter. A few years after the death of his wife in 1579, Napier married her relative Agnes. The second marriage brought a married couple of ten, daughters and sons equally. After the death of Father Napier in 1608, he and his family moved to the Merchiston Castle in Edinburgh, where he remained until the end of his days.

Theology and Invention

The life of John Napier was held amongst the time of sharp religious strife. 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 had hoped for Elizabeth I's accession to the English throne, and there was a suspicion that he was looking for the help of Catholic Philip II, the King of Spain, to achieve this goal. The general meeting of the Scottish church, with which Neper was closely connected, asked the king to fight against the Catholics, and John three times became a member of the committee, who reported to the king about the welfare of the church and persuaded him that it was necessary to bring justice against the enemies of the church of God.

Letter to the King

In January 1594, John Nepper addressed the King of Scotland with a letter in which he formulated "A simple explanation of the whole revelation of St. John." The work, which was supposed to be strictly scientific in nature, was designed to influence modern events. In it, Neper wrote: "May the transformation of the general monstrosity of your country become the constant concern of Your Majesty, and, first of all, of Your Majesty's own home, family and court, and their purification from all suspicions of papism, atheism and neutrality, of which this Revelation predicts that their number should increase significantly in these last days. "

The work occupies a prominent place in the Scottish ecclesiastical history.

Development of weapons

After the publication of the "Simple Explanation", he seems to have engaged in the creation of secret weapons of war. The collection of manuscripts now in the Lambeth Palace in London contains a document signed by John Nepper. What the Scottish mathematician invented is understandable from the list of various devices created by the "grace of God and the work of the masters" to protect his country. Among them are two kinds of incendiary mirrors, part of an artillery gun and a metal chariot from which you can shoot through small holes.

Contribution to mathematics

John Nepper devoted years of life to the study of mathematics, in particular, to the creation of methods for facilitating calculations, the most famous of which is the method of logarithms, which today bears the name of its creator. He began to work on it, probably already in 1594, gradually developing his computer system, in which roots, products and the division of numbers can be quickly calculated using tables of degrees of a fixed number used as the basis.

His contribution to this powerful mathematical tool is set forth in two treatises: Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, published in 1614, and Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Constructio, which was published in two Year after the death of the author. In the first work, the Scottish mathematician described the steps that led to his invention.

Simplify Computing

The logarithms were supposed to simplify the calculations, in particular multiplication, which was necessary for astronomy. Nepper discovered that the basis for this calculation was the relationship between the arithmetic progression-the sequence of numbers, each of which is calculated by a geometric progression from the preceding one by multiplying it by a constant coefficient greater than 1 (for example, sequence 2, 4, 8, 16 ...) Or less than 1 (for example, 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2 ...).

In Descriptio, in addition to describing the nature of the logarithms, John Neper limited himself to enumerating the scope of their use. He promised to explain the method of their construction in a later work. It was Constructio, which deserves attention by the systematic use of a decimal point for separating the fractional part of the numbers from the integer. Decimals were already presented by the Flemish engineer and mathematician Simon Stevin in 1586, but his notation was cumbersome. Constructio often uses a dot as a separator. The Swiss mathematician Just Burgi in 1603-1611, independently of the Scottish mathematician, invented his own system of logarithms, which he published in 1620. But Nepper worked on them earlier than Bürgi and the priority was given to him thanks to an earlier date of publication in 1614.

Rhabdomyology and trigonometry

Although the invention of John Neper logarithms overshadows all his other works, they did not limit his contribution to mathematics. In 1617 he published his Rabdologiae, seu Numerationis per Virgulas Libri Duo ("Rabdology, or Two books counting with sticks", 1667), in which he described the original methods of multiplication and division by small elongated rods divided by transverse lines into 9 squares with Printed on them with numbers. These counting devices, known as Napier's wands, were the forerunner of the logarithmic ruler.

He also made an important contribution to spherical trigonometry, in particular by reducing the number of equations used to express trigonometric relations from ten to two. He is also credited with trigonometric formulas for Napier's analogy, but it is likely that the English mathematician Henry Briggs was also involved in their compilation.

Died John Nepper April 4, 1617 in Merchiston Castle.