Isaac Greenwood

Isaac Greenwood was an American mathematician, born on 11 May 1702 and dead on 22 October 1745, the first Hollisian Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard College. He graduated from Harvard in 1721 and spoke in favour of inoculation in that year smallpox controversy. In London he lodged with John Theophilus Desaguliers and attended his lectures on Newtonian experimental philosophy, a subject he later introduced to the American colonies; his book An Experimental Course of Mechanical Philosophy, published in Boston in 1726, owed much to Desaguliers. Thomas Hollis wished to endow a chair at Harvard for him but later fell out with him over his financial imprudence, and Greenwood was appointed to the Hollis Chair in 1727. During his tenure he wrote anonymously the first natively published American book on mathematics, the Greenwood Book of 1729, which made the first published statement of the short scale value of the billion in the United States.