James Glenie

James Glenie (1750 to 1817) was a Scottish mathematician, soldier and businessman who later became a political figure in New Brunswick. Born in Leslie in Fife, he went to the University of St Andrews, where he began by studying divinity but turned to mathematics, and he then qualified as an engineer at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was an artillery officer when his regiment was sent to North America in 1775, and he went on working at mathematics there. In 1774 he had discovered what he called the antecedental calculus, an attempt to base Newton's fluxional calculus on the binomial theorem rather than on the concept of motion, and he published papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1776 and 1777. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1779 and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1794. After he resigned his commission he brought his family to New Brunswick in 1787, represented Sunbury County in its Legislative Assembly from 1789 to 1809, and died in Chelsea, London, in 1817.