Francis Maseres

Francis Maseres (1731 to 1824) was an English lawyer, judge and mathematician, born in London into a family of French Protestants who had left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. He studied at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took his Bachelor of Arts in 1752 and Master of Arts in 1755, and he was admitted to the bar in 1758. In 1766 he was appointed attorney general of the new British Province of Quebec, and in 1769 he submitted a report on the reform of its law system. He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1771, became cursitor baron of the exchequer in 1773, and took part in the movement for constitutional reform of Quebec that ended with the Constitutional Act of 1791. In mathematics he wrote influential textbooks while keeping a very conservative stance, as in his 1758 Dissertation on the use of the negative sign in algebra. He died in 1824.