James Inman

James Inman (1776 to 1859) was an English mathematician, astronomer and Anglican clergyman who spent most of his career teaching navigation at the Royal Naval College in Portsmouth. Born at Tod Hole in Garsdale in Yorkshire, he was educated at Sedbergh and St John's College, Cambridge, and graduated as first Smith's prizeman and Senior Wrangler in 1800. The Board of Longitude appointed him astronomer on Matthew Flinders's expedition aboard HMS Investigator in 1803 and 1804. In 1808 he became Professor of Nautical Mathematics at the Royal Naval College, and he was the first principal of the Admiralty's School of Naval Architecture. His Navigation and Nautical Astronomy for the Use of British Seamen (1821), known as Inman's Nautical Tables, stayed in use for many years, and its third edition introduced a table of haversines, a term he coined, to simplify the calculation of distances on the earth's surface using spherical trigonometry. He retired in 1839 and died in Portsmouth in 1859.