Colin Maclaurin

Colin Maclaurin was a Scottish mathematician, born at Kilmodan in February 1698 and dead on 14 June 1746, who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. Orphaned young and raised by his uncle, he entered the University of Glasgow at eleven, took his master's degree at fourteen with a thesis on the power of gravity, and at nineteen was elected professor of mathematics at Marischal College in Aberdeen, a record for the youngest professor that stood until 2008. He met Newton in London, won the 1724 prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences for his essay on the percussion of bodies, and in 1725, on Newton's recommendation, became deputy to and then successor of James Gregory at Edinburgh. His Treatise of Fluxions used the Taylor series to characterise maxima, minima and points of inflection, and the series expanded about zero bears his name; he showed that an oblate spheroid is a possible equilibrium in Newton's theory of gravity, found the Euler-Maclaurin formula independently of Euler, and in his Treatise of Algebra of 1748 proved a rule for solving linear systems of two and three unknowns.