Abraham Fletcher

Abraham Fletcher (1714 to 1 January 1793) was an English mathematician and self-taught schoolmaster from Cumberland. He was born at Little Broughton in the parish of Bridekirk, the son of a tobacco-pipe maker who taught him his own trade but gave him no higher instruction. Fletcher learned to read, write and cipher as best he could and threw himself into arithmetic, from which he moved on to the investigation of mathematical theorems, studying in the evenings in the loft above his father's cottage. Having worked through Euclid, he set up as a schoolmaster at about thirty and gained a considerable reputation as a teacher of mathematics. He later turned to botany, studying the properties of plants, sold herbal preparations and was known locally as Doctor Fletcher, and he also practised judicial astrology.