Humphry Ditton was an English mathematician, born in Salisbury on 29 May 1675 and dead on 15 October 1715. The only son of a nonconformist gentleman, he studied theology privately and was for a time a dissenting minister at Tonbridge before devoting himself to mathematics after his father's death. Through the influence of Isaac Newton he was elected mathematical master at Christ's Hospital. He wrote on the tangents of curves and on spherical catoptrics in the Philosophical Transactions, a General Laws of Nature and Motion of 1705 commended by Wolff, and An Institution of Fluxions of 1706, an introduction to Newton's method. His Treatise on Perspective of 1712 anticipated a method later worked out by Brook Taylor, and with William Whiston he proposed a method of finding longitude at sea which the Board of Longitude rejected and Jonathan Swift mocked. He also wrote a mathematical and deductive Discourse Concerning the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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Source Humphry Ditton (Wikipedia)
Source Humphry Ditton (Wikipedia)
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1. Humphry Ditton (Wikipedia)
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Humphry Ditton (29 May 1675-15 October 1715) was an English mathematician.
Biography, birth
Humphry Ditton (29 May 1675-15 October 1715) was an English mathematician.
Biography, gender
He was the author of several influential works.
In Branch: Calculus, Lead, field of work
and rendering easier the writings of Galileo Galilei and Christiaan Huygens, and Principia of Newton; An Institution of Fluxions, containing the First Principles, Operations, and Applications of that admirable Method, as invented by Sir Isaac Newton
In Branch: Geometry, Lead, field of work
He was author of the following memoirs and treatises: Of the Tangents of Curves, published in Philosophical Transactions vol. xxiii; A Treatise on Spherical Catoptrics, published in the Phil.
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